The New Food Anxiety

Food shapes our identity and influences how we see the world.

By Paul Roberts, published on March 01, 1998 - last reviewed on August 30, 2004

Our food is better than ever. So why do we worry so much about what we eat? An emerging psychology of food reveals that when we swap sit-down for take-out, we cut our emotional ties to the table and food ends up fueling our worst fears. Call it spiritual anorexia.

Early in the 1900s, as America struggled to digest yet another wave of immigrants, a social worker paid a visit to an Italian family recently settled in Boston. In most ways, the newcomers seemed to have taken to their new home, language, and culture. There was, however, one troubling sign. "Still eating spaghetti," the social worker noted. "Not yet assimilated." Absurd as that conclusion seems now--especially in this era of pasta--it aptly illustrates our long-standing faith in a link between eating and identity. Anxious to Americanize immigrants quickly, U.S. officials saw food as a critical psychological bridge between newcomers and their old culture and as a barrier to assimilation.

Many immigrants, for example, did not share Americans' faith in large, hearty breakfasts, preferring bread and coffee. Worse, they used garlic and other spices, and mixed their foods, often preparing an entire meal in a single pot. Break these habits, get them to eat like Americans--to partake in the meat heavy, superabundant U.S. diet--and, the theory confidently held, you'd have them thinking, acting, and feeling like Americans in no time.

A century later, the link between what we eat and who we are is not nearly so simple. Gone is the notion of a correct American cuisine. Ethnic is permanently in, and the national taste runs from the red-hot spices of South America to the piquancy of Asia. U.S. eaters are in fact inundated by choice--in cuisines, cookbooks, gourmet magazines, restaurants, and, of course, in food itself. Visitors are still struck dumb by the abundance of our supermarkets: the myriad meats, year-round bonanza of fresh fruits and vegetables, and, above all, the variety--dozens of kinds of apples, lettuces, pastas, soups, sauces, breads, gourmet meats, soft-drinks, desserts, condiments. Salad dressings alone can take up several yards of shelf space. All told, our national supermarket boasts some 40,000 food items, and, on average, adds 43 new ones a day--everything from fresh pastas to microwavable fish-sticks.

Yet if the idea of a correct American cuisine is fading, so, too, is much of that earlier confidence we had in our food. For all our abundance, for all the time we spend talking and thinking about food (we now have a cooking channel and the TV Food Network, with celebrity interviews and a game show), our feelings for this necessity of necessities are oddly mixed. The fact is, Americans worry about food--not whether we can get enough, but whether we are eating too much. Or whether what we eat is safe. Or whether it causes diseases, promotes brain longevity, has antioxidants, or too much fat, or not enough of the right fat. Or contributes to some environmental injustice. Or is a breeding ground for lethal microbes. "We are a society obsessed with the harmful effects of eating," grouses Paul Rozin, Ph.D., professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and a pioneer in the study of why we eat the things we eat. "We've managed to turn our feelings about making and eating food--one of our most basic, important, and meaningful pleasures--into ambivalence."

Rozin and his colleagues aren't just talking here about our frighteningly high rates of eating disorders and obesity. These days, even normal American eaters are often culinary Sybils, by turns approaching and avoiding food, obsessing over and negotiating (with themselves) what they can and can't have--generally carrying on in ways that would have flabbergasted our ancestors. It's the gastronomic equivalent of too much time on our hands.

Liberated from the "nutritional imperative," we've become free to write our own culinary agendas--to eat for health, fashion, politics, or many other objectives--in effect, to use our food in ways that often have nothing to do with physiology or nutrition. "We love with it, reward and punish ourselves with it, use it as a religion," says Chris Wolf, of Noble & Associates, a Chicago-based food marketing consultancy. "In the movie Steel Magnolias, somebody says that what separates us from the animals is our ability to accessorize. Well, we accessorize with food."

One of the ironies regarding what we eat--our psychology of food--is that the more we use food, the less we seem to understand it. Inundated by competing scientific claims, buffeted by conflicting agendas and desires, many of us simply wander from trend to trend, or fear to fear, with little idea of what we're seeking, and almost no certainty that it will make us happier or healthier. Our entire culture "has an eating disorder," argues Joan Gussow, Ed.D., professor emeritus of nutrition and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. "We are more detached from our food than at any time in history."

Beyond clinical eating disorders, the study of why people eat what they eat remains so uncommon that Rozin can count his peers on two hands. Yet for most of us, the idea of an emotional link between eating and being is as familiar as, well, food itself. For eating is the most basic interaction we have with the outside world, and the most intimate. Food itself is almost the physical embodiment of emotional and social forces: the object of our strongest desire; the basis of our oldest memories and earliest relationships.

Lessons from Lunch