Why I hate the phrase “Standard American Diet (SAD)”

 

 

Posted 17 June 2011, by John Durant, Hunter-Gatherer, hunter-gatherer.com

I hate when people use the phrase the “Standard American Diet”, or SAD, to exemplify what’s wrong with our food system.  It’s so contemptuous. The problem with Coca Cola and Snickers isn’t that they’re American foods.  The problem with soda pop and candy bars is that they’re industrial foods.  Some of the earliest industrial foods, like refined flour and sugar, and industrial food processing methods, like pasteurization or canning, weren’t American in origin at all.  The Industrial Revolution started in the UK, people.   The Europeans started it.

Is it any wonder that America became a fast food nation?  First, we were a melting pot and had no food traditions to start with.  Blaming America for not having a food culture that could resist industrial foods makes as much sense as blaming Native Americans for not having immune systems that could resist small pox.  Second, America is really good at that whole industrial growth thing.  We did a kick-ass job of making food damn cheap and damn tasty.  And when America decides to get healthy, look out — cause we’re gonna be really damn healthy.

See, a traditional food culture, like in France, might keep industrial foods at bay, but it also slows the kind of food and health innovation that you read about on this blog and others like it.

So I’m not saying Standard American Diet (SAD) anymore.  Next time you hear someone use it, see if you can pick up on the emotion driving it.  It’s probably either thinly-veiled contempt or deeply repressed self-loathing.

I encourage you to start using the phrase “industrial diets” and “industrial foods”.  The problem is industrial diets, people – not American diets.

 

http://hunter-gatherer.com/blog/why-i-hate-phrase-standard-american-diet-sad