Not everything you can eat is food

I recently read a post celebrating a Senate committee vote to require warning labels on certain ultra-processed foods. 

What caught me was not the vote itself, but the assumption underneath the argument. A person standing in front of a box of cookies does not think he is buying broccoli. He knows what the cookies are. He may want them anyway, put them in the cart, take them home and eat them.

Nothing mysterious has happened.

We seem increasingly uncomfortable leaving the decision there. The story quickly moves outward. The package caught his attention. The shelf placement worked. The price was low. The manufacturer knew how to sell it. All of those things can influence behavior, and some of them are very effective.

But acknowledging influence does not require pretending choice disappeared. Beer is inexpensive, widely available and heavily advertised, yet plenty of people walk past it without buying a case. An influence is not an instruction.

The language around food can make a remarkable progression without anyone quite noticing it. Influence becomes causation, causation becomes helplessness, and helplessness becomes a demand that the environment change before the individual can.

By the end, the person who picked up the package and put it in the cart is barely part of the story. Food companies certainly want us to buy what they make, but they also watch what sells and make more of it. Companies keep making cookies because people keep buying cookies.

Influence and responsibility can exist at the same time.

The claim that healthy eating is expensive often rests on another confused comparison. Basic food itself is frequently inexpensive, but we rarely compare food with food at the same level of preparation. We compare a bag of ingredients with a prepared meal, a restaurant plate with something cooked at home, or one packaged product with another carrying different amounts of labor, processing and convenience. Then the entire price difference gets assigned to health.

Of course, preparation costs money. Restaurants provide labor and service. Prepared meals save time. Packaging, storage and delivery all add something around the food itself. There is nothing wrong with paying for any of that, but it helps to know what we are paying for. Very often what costs more is not health. It is convenience.

The same confusion shows up in what we are willing to call food. There is food, and then there is everything we do to food. We cook and preserve it because those things are useful. We can also keep working on it until the original food becomes only one part of a manufactured product. The fact that two things can both be eaten does not mean we have to think about them in the same way.

A baked potato and a packaged potato snack make the distinction obvious enough. One is a food prepared for a meal. The other is a product built from food ingredients, made to be stable on the shelf and easy to eat. No scientific classification system is needed to recognize that they are different kinds of things, and no moral judgment is required either. We can eat either one. We simply do not have to pretend that everything edible belongs in the same practical category.

That brings the argument back to the warning label. Most people do not need the government to reveal that cookies are not broccoli. A warning may discourage someone from buying them, and perhaps that is the goal, but that is different from giving the shopper information he did not have. He already knew what he was buying.

Personal responsibility does not mean never eating a cookie. It means being able to say that I wanted it, bought it and ate it. Tomorrow I can make a different choice. If I want another cookie someday, I can eat that one too. The package may have caught my attention and the manufacturer may have done a very good job selling it, but the choice is still mine. I do not need a warning label to tell me what I chose.

Seth Schneider is a health columnist for the Bonner County Daily Bee.