John McWhorter says you can’t blame obesity just on poverty:
The no-supermarket paradigm discourages us from considering that human beings acquire — through childhood experience, cultural preferences and economics — a palate. Note that the economy is part of the equation: The cheapness of sugary drinks is notorious, thanks to the popularity and influence of the muckraking 2008 documentary Food, Inc. and Eric Schlosser‘s best-selling book Fast Food Nation, which was made into a movie in 2006.
Culture, too, creates a palate — and to point that out is not to find “fault.” Example: Slavery and sharecropping didn’t make healthy eating easy for black people back in the day. Salt and grease were what they had, and Southern blacks brought their culinary tastes North (Zora Neale Hurston used to bless her friend Langston Hughes with fried-chicken dinners). Fried food, such as fried chicken, was also easy to transport for blacks traveling in the days of Jim Crow, when bringing your own food on the road was a wise decision.
My mothers side of the family hails from Tampa, Florida and Savannah, Georgia. She and my uncle ate chitlins as kids. They’ve told me stories about how you could tell that my uncle Mickey was a surgeon simply because of the meticulousness with which he cleaned pig intestines. I really enjoy hearing these kinds of stories because my family is very different now–the Savannah branch, for example, have all converted to Judaism so much of the traditional soul food canon, if it gets cooked at all, has to be altered.
I’ve have never in my life eaten chitlins, in part because both my mother and my uncle now find them singularly disgusting. Is that because they’ve changed culturally? Or is it because having the means to eat really good food actually has a significant effect on what you consider appetizing because it alters your potential choices, not simply as a matter of what you can afford, but because money also affects where you live, who you fraternize with, and what your social peers now find acceptable or appropriate? I don’t think there’s an answer to those questions that elevates “culture” over economics with any certainty.
