In The Belly (Part One)

I put off writing this essay about food for a very long time. There seemed to be too much competition out there with other news that made the topic seem irrelevant. When I began making notes for this piece, there was a report in a national newspaper on how one out of thirty-one patrons of restaurants in Toronto had become sickened by the food they were served. And now, there is a report that the U.S. military wants to do more to improve the quality of its recruits. The ones they were receiving were too overweight when they tried to sign up for the armed forces. Seems like the issue has returned.

As a child, I remember seeing a poster from the Canadian Heart Association with a photo of a smiling man’s face torn in half.  Across this image was the following: “You Have a Fifty Percent Chance of Dying of Heart Disease.” And recently, the latest data indicates that one out of four Canadians now has diabetes, now the number one killer in North America.



Yes, we have heard all of the bad news. We have all of the information that we may not want to know. Our food is labeled for content, including the number of servings that will provide us with a given number of vitamins and a certain amount of fat; “fiber” and “multigrain” are now a part of our language; healthy foods and drinks are lined up on our shelves in major supermarkets and convenience stores. And we have not learned a thing.

I put off this topic because of all of the competing information on the topic. There are crises with our weight, our children’s weight, the price of food and with health services. Diseases that should not be affecting young people have found a foothold because of bad choices of diet and, by implication, bad parents who have spoiled their children. And we receive too much conflicting advice. Milk prevents osteoporosis and is good for bones; it is also taken from cows pumped up with growth hormones for higher yields. Fish has Omega-3 fats…and iodine, mercury, and is threatened with extinction. Bread and sugar, staples of diets since the dawn of agriculture, are considered the main cause of a heavier generation. We cannot even talk about meat anymore. We have politicized this staple of the North American diet and any sort of discourse is impossible without being shouted down by an opposing camp.


But why has this happened? Is it just because of our need to eat and not consider the consequences? Do we really care about expanding waist lines and expensive medical bills? I do not think any of this is true. There is something deeper and unspoken in the runaround we get when we try to understand what food means to us. We have now reached the point where we are afraid of what we eat.