The Food Guys react to an article in Atlantic magazine by Laura Shapiro reviewing two books published in 2019: The Way We Eat Now: How The Food Revolution Has Transformed Our Lives, Our Bodies And Our World, by British food writer and historian, Bee Wilson, and Pressure Cooker: Why Home Cooking Won’t Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do About It, by sociologists Sarah Bowen, Joslyn Brenton and Sinikka Elliott.
Around the world, an ocean of junk food has compressed traditional diets. Jon Jackson names the tool that dangles processed food incessantly before people's eyes, like a mirage: advertising. "Television is absolutely an avenue to junk food. I would ask people to keep their eyes open and just count the number of times, while they're watching television, that they see an ad in which the people are watching television and eating."
But Greg Patent points to the circumstances plaguing a family profiled in Pressure Cooker: they're too broke to fix their car or washing machine, and there's not a single shared hour when they're all home from the fast food restaurants where they work. If grazing on processed food and soft drinks from their jobs or the convenience store is this family's go-to meal plan, the reasons are abundant.
(Broadcast: "The Food Guys," 12/1/19 and 12/8/19. Listen weekly on the radio at 9:53 a.m. Sundays, or via podcast.)
