Although scientists and institutions have been warning about the risks of overconsumption for years, ultra-processed foods of industrial origin and high in fat, starch, sugar or additives continue to dominate the menus of companies around the world, including a beautiful part of the planet, of course Europe. But if there is one country that stands out in its intake, it is the United States. Studies estimate that ultra-processed foods make up 73% of your food supply and are the source of more than 60% of the average American’s daily calories.

It wasn’t always this way. In fact, to understand its importance, we need to look at a key period of the 20th century: the Great Depression and the post-war period.

Years of hungerThe Great Depression that followed the stock market crash in New York in 1929 may be long gone, but nearly a century later, its traces are still strongly felt in the American diet. By the early 1930s, unemployment was around 25% and there were long lines of people going to charity shops in New York City to get food. Tens of thousands of plates were distributed daily in “bread lines.”

So much so that during his 1932 presidential campaign, Franklin Roosevelt realised that if charities and states could not combat malnutrition, it would be up to the federal government to step up and “take responsibility for the situation”. “For the first time in US history, the federal government decided it had the responsibility to feed the hungry,” Andrew Coe, co-author of ‘A Square Meal’, told the BBC. “A Culinary History of the Great Depression’.

To hopeless problems… You know, the creative solutions that they’ve used in the United States. In addition to aid distribution and food distribution, the country has used its imagination to deal with the crisis, especially when the problem of malnutrition is added to the problem of Europe being dragged into war.

The food was introduced low cost Like the famous jello salad, there was a pedagogy in the Office of Home Economics on how to prepare nutritious meals with little resources or government-distributed food, and the New Deal was created in 1933 in response to the Federal Emergency Relief. Some of the efforts also aimed to mechanize the fields, abandon “old farming practices” in favor of more modern practices, bring electricity to rural areas, and encourage the use of refrigerators.

“At prices we can afford”“They wanted to modernise American industry, both in terms of production and distribution,” Coe told the BBC. “But by 1941, Thomas Parran, head of the Public Health Service, admitted to the food industry that the nutritional problem was “a lack of necessary food” and “starvation without sufficient calories.”

“The solution to the malnutrition of the population as a whole is not for us to become a nation of drug consumers, but to have adequate supplies of all the food we need at prices we can afford,” Parran insisted. Hunger was still a challenge for the country, he said, and finding a way out required industry to step in.

Food oriented“One of the things the federal government did was require food companies, especially bakeries, to add vitamins to their foods,” Coe recalls. “It was kind of an excuse to make overly processed foods because if you could add vitamins to your foods.” You didn’t really have to worry about or focus too much on the quality of the rest of the ingredients. They were looking for ways to make food that was getting into homes cheaper. There was also a special focus on caloric intake.

Replacing the nutrition chip. It may sound far-fetched, but again, the legacy of that time was profound and is still felt in the way people eat in the United States. Jane Ziegelman, co-author of the 2016 book A Square Meal, explained: Atlantic When it comes to food, the Great Depression seems to have marked a before and after between 19th century culture and modern habits – and not just because the government began to take a “very active role” in nutrition.

“That’s when we start thinking about food groups by group, vitamins and minerals, and evaluating foods. When we start looking at the sides of cereal boxes and seeing how many grams of sugar and fiber they have,” Ziegelman says, “that’s the beginning of a kind of nutritional awareness.”

Swanson ad from the 1960s.

Two words: SAD and TV dinner. This phase is so important that some believe it was the beginning of the Standard American Diet, known by its acronym SAD, a term still used today. As time progressed and in the mid-1940s, after the end of World War II, an equally interesting phenomenon began that tells us about changes in consumer habits in homes: “supermarketization”.

People no longer filled their pantries with food from their neighborhood shops, stalls, or farms. They went to supermarkets, big, modern stores, with a wide range of offerings, packaged and refrigerated foods.

“The Great Depression marked the beginning of the modern food era,” Coe emphasizes. One concept helps to understand this transformation: the TV dinner, cheap, frozen, pre-made, packaged, and ultra-processed food designed for quick consumption. It warms up on the tray for half an hour and is ready to serve in front of the TV. If there was one company that stood out with its offering, it was Swanson and its turkey, cornbread, peas, and potatoes service.

Simple and cheap. Just like today, two adjectives that had already triumphed in the postwar food industry. “TV dinners” could be prepared quickly, were somewhat liberating for women who had jobs outside the home, and were also cheap. The industry sought to rethink the composition of foods by adding sugar, salt, and fat to improve costs while also making their food as palatable as possible.

“From an American perspective, this was a big change and led to this ready meal: low cost, high calorie, but not necessarily high quality,” Christopher Gardner, an expert at Stanford University in California, told the BBC. “In the 1970s, authorities made a decision that also affected the calorie load of the diet: they encouraged the cultivation of soybeans and corn, from which they could obtain high-fructose corn syrup.

So what is the situation today? In the US, the net weight of ultra-processed foods is around 70% of food and beverage offerings available in supermarkets, at least in 2018, meeting this label. While that number may not be significant on its own, it is estimated that close to 60% of the country’s caloric intake comes from this source, ultra-processed foods; this represents a much higher percentage than countries like Brazil (20%) or Mexico (30%).

FAO data also show that the per capita calorie supply has increased, albeit intermittently, since the 1960s, a fact worth pondering: the international organization points out that ultra-processed foods are attractive and profitable, but they tend to be “imbalanced”, nutritionally inadequate and “over-consumed”. Another report by Pew Research comes to an equally interesting conclusion: a significant increase in fat consumption between 1970 and 2010.

“We eat more”“Overall, we’re eating more than ever: The average American consumed 2,481 calories a day in 2010, about 23 percent more than in 1970. That’s more than most adults need to maintain their current weight,” Pew Research reports. “Nearly half of our calories come from two groups: flours and grains (581 calories, or 23.4 percent) and fats and oils (575, or 23.2 percent), compared with 37.3 percent in 1970.”

Images | Wikipedia, Louis Hansel (Unsplash), Tony Fischer (Flickr) and Joe Wolf (Flickr)

via | BBC

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