Last month, I spent a few days in Washington, DC, with my three oldest friends. Growing up together on Long Island, we had sleepovers under Jane’s mother’s grand piano, starred together in the best-ever 5th and 6th grade production of Oklahoma!, and held Game of Life competitions almost every day after school for an entire year. When we get together we have a lot to talk about.
As usual, the plans for this year’s reunion were complicated. Ronnie got us tickets to see the White House from the top of the Washington Monument. Jane and Lee got us to Georgetown for dinner and shopping. I got to convince my friends that we had to visit George Washington’s grist mill. Not exactly your run-of-the-mill tourist stop, but my awesome friends were ready and willing. Then the grist mill got me thinking about food-related inventions over the past 200 years.
This post is the first in a series of three entitled “Food Used to be Hard Work.” Over the past year, I’ve talked a lot about how the amount of work we do to get our food ready to eat is inverse (opposite) to the amount of insulin we release to catch the food and escort it to our cells. The more work we do, the less insulin we use. And the reverse is also true: the less work we do to prepare and break down the food we eat, the faster we absorb it, and the more insulin we must release to catch it. The goal is to find the balance.
So — where did the obesity and diabetes epidemic come from? What’s different now compared to 100 years ago? And what does Washington’s grist mill have to do with obesity and diabetes? Well, let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, not very long ago, almost everyone worked in agriculture. They had to. Given the limited technology of the day, it was the only way families could hope to raise enough food to get from one growing season to the next without running out. Every family had its knives, scythes, and wooden plows, the tools that dominated agriculture for thousands of years.
For 10,000 years, civilizations followed the same annual pattern of plowing in early spring, sowing in late spring, and harvesting in the autumn. Plowing could be done by a farmer with a horse- or ox-drawn plow, and sowing, or spreading seed, could be done by anyone. Harvesting, on the other hand, was back-breaking, hard work. Obesity would be virtually impossible in a world where people worked so hard for their food.
The past 100 years have been a time of unprecedented industrial growth and change. Automation in industries of all kinds, including energy, finance, construction, and transportation, introduced us to the concept of “economies of scale,” whereby we learned that the unit costs of production would shrink as a company’s growth permitted it to save money by purchasing its raw materials in bulk. It was a time of expansion, of testing the limits. How big could companies get? What were the consequences of that kind of growth? In every industry, revolutionary inventions were increasing automation and improving efficiency.
In the food sector, that meant a few things. Some brilliant inventors built machines that would harvest crops more efficiently that ever before. Next week I’m going to talk about the combine harvester, one of the greatest labor-saving devices ever invented. The following week, I’ll get back to Washington’s grist mill, which revolutionized the milling process and, for the first time, allowed a single person to convert large amounts of whole grains into flour. Other inventors figured out how to remove the bran fiber coat and the germ to make the flour look cleaner and increase its shelf life. Lastly, new edibles like breakfast cereals, chips, instant soups, and granola bars, made with manufactured products such as partially hydrogenated oils, textured soy vegetable protein, and high-fructose corn syrup, were being developed. These manufactured products cost substantially less than traditional foodstuffs, and soaring profits provided a significant inducement to develop more of the same.
All of these inventions had one important feature in common: They decreased the work of food gathering, preparation, and metabolism. That means they increased the amount of insulin we used to break down our food. And that high insulin state became the norm across America.
The 21st century is a different kind of time. At least with regard to food, it is the time when we begin to understand and address the limits of making food easy to eat. There is such a thing as too easy. Too easy is what causes diabetes and obesity.
Next week: why is a combine harvester called a “combine”?
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