Can You Make Broccoli Taste as Good as Fritos?

“If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. It's the hard that makes it great.”

Jimmy Dugan in A League of Their Own

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Nutritionists are trying to get us to eat healthier, particularly to lose weight or maintain it after having lost it. That’s wonderful, but that is only one side of the equation, the demand side. The supply side is “providers,” the people who grow and manufacture food, chefs who create recipes in restaurants and people who write cookbooks. Here’s a challenge for the supply side, a hard challenge: start making healthy foods taste as good as those that are really tasty.

We have a horrible obesity crisis in this country, we are the fattest country amongst the OECD countries (described by The Economist as “the club of mostly rich countries”) which include Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and Mexico. Right now, more than 4 out of 10 people (42.4%) in the U.S. are obese, the highest ever recorded. It is expected to get higher, to 5 out of 10 by the end of the decade

I am certainly not saying that obesity is to blame on the supply side nor that there are not things people can do to reduce their weight. Emphatically, I do not blame it on corporate greed.

A look at this chart shows that our national weight gain really kicked in in 1980. Food corporations were trying just as hard to make money (you know, being “greedy”) prior to 1980 as they are now. We had plenty of sugar sweetened beverages and chips – potato chips were invented in 1853 in Sarasota Springs, New York. Frito’s (one my favorites) was a latecomer, being invented in 1961. Cakes, the kind with icing, were first baked in Europe in the mid-1600s. We’ve been eating fatty meats since the stone age and cheese was first discovered around 8000 BCE. French fries, those ubiquitous accompaniments to so many meals, were apparently born in Belgium in 1680. Today, the average American consumes about thirty pounds each year.

All of those foods are what nutritionists advise us to limit (eliminate, eat smaller portions or less frequently) if we want to lose weight. They are calorie (otherwise known as energy) dense foods. Energy dense foods have more calories per specific weight of foods than foods that are not energy dense. My point is that they have been around for a long, long time so we can’t blame producers for the sudden change in weight gain. Plus, they taste good.

What we should be eating instead is nutrient dense foods or low energy density foods such as green leafy vegetables (kale and spinach), beans, quinoa, broccoli, brussels sprouts, salmon, sweet potatoes and seaweed. The problem is taste. Even one of our former presidents frequently mentioned that “I do not like broccoli. And I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid.”

We are likely to hear much more about the demand side of the equation as the White House kicks off a national conversation about food. But maybe the idea isn’t to harp on people to change their diets or overcoming neighborhood disparities in access to healthy foods. If we eat for pleasure, and science says we do, then a good start is to make healthier foods taste better.

We are now on the cusp of being able to create foods that do just that. With combinations of things like genetic engineering and precision fermentation, we can create foods that evolve the way we want them to, not the way mother nature evolved them to avoid being safe and healthy – and being killed and eaten.