The anxiety of appetite

Barry Glassner, author of "The Gospel of Food," takes aim at foodies' sacred cows and explains why many of our menu choices are motivated by fear as much as hunger.

By Tracie McMillan

Read more: Obesity, Cooking, Life, Eat and Drink, Food and Travel

Jan. 23, 2007 | America's food enthusiasts may find it hard to place the name Barry Glassner. He's not a television chef, or a restaurant critic, or a diet guru. Indeed, the University of Southern California sociologist is known primarily for his best-selling 2000 book, "The Culture of Fear," a dissection of the anxious underpinnings of the American psyche. It's a subject that might seem to have little relevance to the dinner table, but Glassner begs to differ. If his latest book, "The Gospel of Food," makes one thing plain, it's that few topics generate more worry among Americans than our breakfasts, lunches and dinners.

Glassner relishes debate, and "Gospel" -- which sports the insistent subtitle Everything You Think You Know About Food Is Wrong -- takes on nearly every sacred cow of contemporary food culture. High-end restaurant reviewers, eaters seeking "authentic" ethnic eateries, organic converts, local agriculture proponents, and fast food's detractors all receive a methodical interrogation of the accuracy of their claims.

But while Glassner examines nearly every issue populating the food landscape, "Gospel" shines brightest when he turns his gaze to two that are frequently absent from it: poverty and class. Though he places himself in the company of industrial food's most vocal critics, like Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, Glassner sets his sights on them, too, questioning the very journalists, writers and advocates who claim to speak truth to power. The problem, he argues, isn't that the Pollans and Schlossers of the world are wrong, but that they're not exactly right, either. To get to the bottom of something as complicated as America's obsession with fast food -- a category of dining, he points out, that offers low-income families a clean, affordable and convenient meal in ways that anti-industrialists seldom acknowledge -- he'd rather engage with the complexity of the matter than reduce it to sound bites.

Glassner manages nonetheless to come up with a few maxims of his own: Restaurant reviews rarely reflect the experience of average diners -- because most top-notch food critics, disguises or no, are rapidly recognized by chefs, who heap special treatment upon such visitors. The American family meal is not dead -- in fact, one of the most oft-cited studies in this vein, which attributed the success of a cohort of National Merit Scholars to eating regular family meals, never existed. And obesity is not a simple problem of eating less and exercising more; its prevalence among the poor is likely attributable to bingeing brought on by a periodic scarcity of food -- not mere ignorance.

Still, Glassner's laundry list of inaccurate spins should not be taken as a humorless diatribe. "Gospel" is also sprinkled with a passionate eater's enthusiasm for cuisines both street and haute. And the extensive journalistic and academic research around which the book revolves is bookended by discussions of the pleasures of food, ranging from Glassner's own horror at a birthday cake devoid of wheat, sugar, milk and eggs to his hearty enjoyment of a rib joint in south Los Angeles. The point, says Glassner, is that a mix of American puritanism and health obsession has stripped the pleasure out of many Americans' meals -- with little to show for it.

Salon recently caught up with Glassner by phone to discuss why trans fat bans aren't all they're cracked up to be and how your mom's advice about food may be the best you'll ever get.

How did the idea for this book come about?

When I finished my previous book, "The Culture of Fear," it became obvious to me that I had missed one of the biggest fears in American culture, which is that many Americans are afraid of just about every kind of food for one reason or another. So that's what got me started. And secondly, I myself am a big food enthusiast, I love eating diverse foods in very diverse sorts of places, so this gave me an opportunity to do that -- and make it tax deductible.

Was there a specific incident that made you recognize Americans' fear of food?

It's the one I start the book with: I was at this birthday party for a child, and I took a bite of the birthday cake and my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. The parents were so proud that they had provided this "healthy" birthday cake, because it didn't have anything in it that would make you want to eat a cake. It didn't have eggs, or milk, or wheat, or butter, of course, and it didn't have any sugar because, of course, that could kill you immediately. I started thinking, "It is bizarre that this is what we've come to," and that was kind of the turning point.

You work hard to debunk studies, pulling out ones that contradict commonly held assumptions, or ones that are based on one or two earlier studies or a misrepresentation of findings. What was the most surprising discrepancy you came across?

I guess I'd pick that National Merit study, which supposedly showed that the common denominator among a cohort of National Merit Scholars was that they all had regular family meals. It's mentioned all over the place, when in fact it never existed. The whole truth about family meals was a surprise; I had thought that the family meal was a thing of the past, when in fact families eat together at about the same level as the 1950s.

Food and obesity are such hot topics right now, but you take aim at some very well respected writers on the subject. For instance, Greg Critser's book "Fat Land" basically argues that we need to be hardcore about the idea that it's not OK to be fat and, really, lines must be drawn in the sand. But my sense is that you come at the problem from a different angle.

I think there's a lot of merit about Critser's book and I'm also critical of parts of it. So when he says that the rich are more insightful about what to eat, that concerns me. I think that if we want to understand why it is that people of lower income are more likely to be overweight or obese, to simplify it to a moral condemnation is not a wise way to go. The very notion that wealthy Americans are constrained in their consumption patterns is absurd. Witness their SUVs, their oversize homes. It's fashionable for the wealthy to be thin and eat particular sorts of foods that are on the approved list, but let's not give them undue credit for that, especially at a time when you can go to most any high-end restaurant and get very high-fat, high-calorie meals.

If you want to understand why people of low income tend to be more overweight and obese, it's a complicated story. But we shouldn't leave out the effect that food insecurity itself has; in the book I go into this in some detail, but basically there's a parallel pattern to binge eating, where people who periodically run low on food resemble people who are on diets. When food stamps run out, or the kids' medical expenses take precedence, or the local food bank shuts down or runs out of food, you're not going to eat a lot. And when food becomes available again, you binge.

We know that this pattern, this binge pattern, contributes to overweight and obesity. Yet we've come to have this odd notion that it's what people eat, it's what low-income people eat, rather than what they don't eat, or when they don't eat, or which options are not available to them, that explains their weight. And moreover, to the extent that heavy people are stigmatized in this country -- as they very widely are these days, including by people who see themselves as liberals or progressives -- the more we're heaping on further dangers to their health because we know that discrimination itself is a predictor of ill health.

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