The Manipulation of How Food Looks
Eye of the Beholder - Part 2
As you may recall in The Eye of The Beholder - Part 1, our eyes play a huge roll in how we find food, determine if it is ripe or safe to eat, and even how we determine if the place we are at has enough food to sustain us.
But we no longer live in that ancient past. Today many of us outsource our food-finding and meal preparation in all kinds of ways. This outsourcing of food has implications for our mental and physical wellbeing.
In part 2, let’s explore how changes in our food patterns, and manipulations of how our foods look, affect our mind-body connection.
Trends Up Until 1970-ish
We don’t actually have to go back that far in time to find a food world much different than the one we live in today. In our recent past, food still occupied a large part of our daily lives, activities and rituals.
There’s this beautifully restored film of Vancouver, BC in 1907 that shows just how recently life was VERY different than today. I watch the scenes, filmed from the front of a street car, and I am struck by how lean and active everyone appears, and by the lack of cars. Modern life is just not that old. It wasn’t until 1925 that half the homes in the United States had electricity. And it took until the 1960’s for most homes in Canada to have refrigerators.
My point is that up until electricity and refrigerators, our food habits were largely unchanged for hundreds of years. Cities had grown up and were supplied by the rural areas around them. Few products were shipped long distances because of the cost and spoilage made that unworkable. People mostly cooked at home, and everyone had the skills to minimize food waste out of necessity.
I was a kid in the early 1970’s and grew up with my working mother still baking all our bread and cookies on the weekends to get us through the week. In the summertime, she made preserves and jams. Milk was still being delivered to our door in glass bottles from the dairy. We ate nearly all our meals at home and we ate together.
We were taught it was wrong (unethical) to waste food. I learned from a young age how to carefully trim foods to get the most out each item. We went out to farms and orchards to pick fruit for the preserves ourselves. And much of family life revolved around the meal that just finished or the next one to prepare.
Shifting Food Values
Major shifts in food habits began after WWII. With working mothers, refrigerators, and grocery store chains came the first TV dinner in 1953. Meant to ease the burden of food preparation, the idea of a fast meal quickly took off as a great product idea and this had far-reaching effects in the grocery store.
A study released in 2021, demonstrated that home-cooked foods fell to below 30% of household food budgets in the UK (compared to being more than 50% of the budget in 1980). The shift in dietary patterns to include more pre-made and ultra processed foods has been pegged as part of the obesity crisis facing much of the world.