Recently, we finished up an essay arc on the difficult process of creating lasting personal change.  (The last essay in the series is on Commitment and links to the other three are embedded within.)  The example I used throughout the series was the mental gymnastics required to lose weight and keep it off.  As I was wrapping up that last essay in the arc, I noted my frustration that I needed to be a Woman of Means and Leisure to be able to make this change happen.  The reason, I stated, is that we have been surrounded for decades now by a food industry that has normalized a range of really unhealthy eating choices and habits.  Breaking through this normalization, saying to myself, “No! This isn’t right!” was and continues to be a huge effort.  And that pisses me off.  And now you’re going to read about it.

So let’s start by digging into my frustrations with Big Food.  I remember a commercial from McDonald’s when I was little in which they touted the ability to feed a family of four for under $4.  Amazingly, inflation means that the $4 spent in 1970 for four small hamburgers and four small fries is about equivalent in buying power to the $26.84 you’d spend today for four Big Mac Value Meals.  Let’s say you have a small Coke with your hamburger and small fries.  That’s 620 calories.  Today, you get a Big Mac, a medium fry and a medium soda.  According to the McDonald’s site, that will set you back 1080 calories.  SuperSize that baby and you’re looking at 1330 calories.  Now, you could say, “Look how much more FOOD you get for the same inflation-adjusted-dollars!”  Yeah, and I say, “Look how easy and cheap it is to consume so many empty calories.”  In 1970, people were satisfied with a regular hamburger and a small fry.  Today, that would be a snack for many people.  The result?  The US obesity rate is above 36% (tops in the developed world); in 1970 the obesity rate was 15.7%. Today, 10.5% of the population has diabetes and another 34.5% have pre-diabetes; in 1970, 2% were diagnosed with the disease. The top two causes of death in this country are heart disease and cancer, both of which have a strong dietary connection.

I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t already know by citing these statistics.  Where I’m going with this discussion is to point out how we’ve normalized these kinds of eating habits.  Our store shelves are stocked with all kinds of convenience aids and packaged foods to help save time in food preparation.  Even the fresh produce is often grown from engineered stock that has been bred for size and shelf longevity and not nutritional richness.  My discomfort with this information is that these movements in our national food culture are driven by industry profits, not what is good for us as humans.  Even the “low fat” craze, which looks on the surface to be health-driven, was all funded and driven by the sugar industry!  Don’t even get me started on the restaurant industry.  My point is this:  don’t trust large corporations to make good decisions on your behalf.  Your health is your own responsibility and unfortunately you have to fight corporate profits to maintain it.  I’m not dissing businesses, though.  I’m more focused on how the combination of ubiquitous marketing, the engineering of our food supply for cost and volume, and focus on taste over nutrition has normalized such really unhealthy habits that it would be natural to think, “Well, that’s just how food is.  There is nothing I can do.”  Wow.  And worse: if that’s what is all around you, it’s also natural to think, “Well, it can’t be that bad if everyone is eating like this.”  It’s that bad and you know it.  Hence the incredible mental effort it can take to lose weight, never mind the cost (in dollars and time) of buying and preparing healthy food.

That’s the rant part of this essay: my frustration with how we view food.  It is easy to see the “right” and “wrong” in this issue.  This move away from nutritionally dense food is making us fat and killing us.  But other things get normalized, too, and it’s not always bad.  Let’s talk about air quality.  Also in 1970, Congress enacted the Clean Air Act, along with founding the EPA.  Big Business interests were apoplectic and apocalyptic about the effect of these regulations on economic growth.  By the 1990’s, significant progress had been made in reducing, particularly, industrial sources of air pollution.  Not only did the economy continue to purr along, these regulations spurred amazing innovations in product and process development, like lower emission cars (also eliminating lead in fuels thanks to the need to avoid poisoning those catalytic converters) as well as water based and lower solvent paints.  Addressing regulatory-driven product development needs in lower solvent paints absorbed most of the bench-chemist part of my career, so I got a job from all of this!  Can you imagine, today, going back to the kinds of air pollution we had in the 70’s?  Can you imagine painting the inside of your house with solvent-based paints (maybe even including lead)?  We have normalized an expectation, now, of breathing clean air.  Let’s hope we can keep it that way.  There were plenty of interests then fighting the regulations that led to today’s healthier environment and plenty that, today, say we’ve gone too far.  Let’s hope the bar has been raised enough that we won’t go too far backwards.

The question then becomes this:  when is fighting normalization the right thing to do and when is fighting it just being resistant to change?  Boy, I wish I had a simple rule for figuring that one out.  You could always choose to embrace change that is good and resist change that is bad, but invariably whenever there is a Big Societal Change there are both winners and losers.  The winners will of course champion normalization of the change and the losers will resist.  Unfortunately, history tends to be the best guide to which changes are better overall for humanity, which does not help us make decisions today.  Here is what I suggest: when faced with a change that seems to be normalizing around you, ask yourself who the winners and losers are.  Are you uncomfortable with the change? Why? Think several steps ahead—if this normalization takes root, what are the possible next outcomes?  How do you feel about those outcomes?  Do you have the facts? Face your discomforts head on and challenge them.

I know I can be seen as equivocating when I refuse to give direct statements and that is because it is impossible to make definitive statements about broad topics like this one.  However, I will end on this note:  sometimes you just know something is wrong and you need to fight normalization.  As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Hate and violence justified on arguably flimsy reasons are wrong.  Sowing fear and alarm, particularly with lies, is wrong.  Division and exclusion are wrong.  Further hurting people who are already disadvantaged is wrong!  Listen to your gut.  You KNOW when normalizing a behavior or a change is wrong.  Fight it!