CHAPTER 1
The Muddle of the Modern Meal
We have always had a tendency to eat and run. Even as early as the 1800s, a European traveler remarked that the U.S. national motto might as well have been âGobble, gulp, and go.â Convenience is part of our national heritage. Yet today we have taken that value to new extremesâsnacking more than ever, and overhauling the very definition of the American meal.
The latest market research shows that ease of preparation and consumption are the driving forces of twenty-first-century food product development. Sales of Keurig machinesâthe speedy, single-serving coffee maker even a five-year-old can operateâhave soared. We now have individual-size Keurig K-Cup pods of Campbellâs soup. Surely phá» is next.
Prepared-foods sections at grocery stores are going gangbusters, and weâre dining out more than any time in our history. Not coincidentally, the percentage of single-person households is at an all-time high. (Who likes cooking for one?) Weâll do whatever it takes to finish the eating to move on to just about any other activity.
What is it about Americans that makes us view food consumption this way? Why have we always been like this? Why have we really never put food first?
Harry Balzer, the expert on eating and drinking patterns from the market research firm NPD Group, argues that âone of the core tenets of human evolution is: Find someone else to do the cooking.â
To survive, we need food. Yet we also need things like shelter, clothes, and high-speed Internet. In order to pay for things like shelter, clothes, and high-speed Internet, one must have money. To make money, one must (at least theoretically) work. Therefore, evolutionarily speaking, time working cannot be threatened by time feeding ourselves. So what to do?
âYouâd have to hire someone,â Balzer says. Or better yet, âYouâd have to get married.â But today, with most women also working, they are no longer the âsomeone else to do the cooking,â and both men and women are looking for someone, or something, to prepare food for us.
Enter the food industry.
This means a greater reliance on food in restaurants (sit-down or take-out) and on processed foods (high and low quality and everything in between).
Our American work ethic undermines our eating. And being this busy has brought two major changes to our food culture: how we define what is a meal and when is a meal.
Today, a mere 20 percent of snacking happens outside the home. When we think snacks, we think dashboard dining or keyboard munching. But thatâs not how we mostly snack. When we think snacks, we also think cuddling a bowl of chips while watching TV. This kind of snacking and the term âcouch potatoâ are still apt. But there is a stunning new development: âThe snack food is becoming the meal,â Balzer says.
Food and Work
Among the thirty-four developed countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United States ranks around twelfth each year for annual hours worked per person, and we always beat the average across the countries. We work more than Japan and pretty much all the European countries but less than some, including Russia and Mexico.
In Danish, there is a word that I canât begin to pronounce: arbejdsglĂŠde. It means âhappiness at work.â Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, and Icelandic also have words for this. There is no English word for it.
On the flipside, Japanese has a special word of its own: karoshi. It means âdeath from overwork.â Washington Post reporter Blaine Harden reported in 2008: âFor decades, the Japanese government has been trying, and largely failing, to set limits on work and overtime. The problem of karoshi became prevalent enough to warrant its own word in the boom years of the late 1970s, as the number of Japanese men working more than 60 hours a week soared.â In 2007, the single-greatest cause of suicides there related to work? Too much of it.
So it could be worse, but the United States still has it pretty bad.
Work and time constraints affect both how we eat at the workplace and how we eat in the hours outside of work. We canât understand American food culture without understanding American work culture. Itâs all interconnected.
When asked how important working hard is to getting ahead in life, 73 percent of Americans rate it a ten or âvery important,â compared to the median of just 50 percent among forty-four countries worldwide.
When youâre a salaried employee, does time belong to you or to your employer? The latter is true for the vast majority of workersâbecause their natural eagerness to work hard runs smack into their employers not being required to pay them overtime. The thinking by both parties is that if youâre earning a salary over a certain threshold, working beyond forty hours a week is merely a trade-off you accept.
âAs a nation, we work harder and longer than almost all of our competitors, and much of that work is uncompensated,â writes Fran Sussner Rodgers, a work and family consultant, in a New York Times op-ed. âWe accept that that is the way it has to be, without much questioning.â
But there is something of a rejectionist group brewing, and theyâre challenging the going norm that time is not your own but your employerâs, that the best you can do is eke out the occasional happy hour or be among the 59 percent of Americans who actually take all their paid vacation time.
Theyâre asking us to ask ourselves: Are we really okay signing up for a lifetime of blurred lines between work and home?
Many outside the United States have heeded similar calls. For example, at Volkswagen, e-mail for some employees is shut down from thirty minutes after the end of their shift until thirty minutes before the next dayâs shift starts. If you work at Daimler, you can opt to have all the e-mails you receive while youâre on vacation automatically deleted. The program resulted from work done by psychologists at the University of Heidelberg, and nearly every worker at Daimler has enthusiastically embraced it. (The sender is kindly notified their e-mail has been deleted and provided with a colleague to contact in the meantime.) That leaves the vacationer no reasonâother than e-mail junkie disorderâto check work e-mail from the beach.
So why the desperate measures? The desperate times, of course!
Workers are burned out, and mental health is suffering. If you work at our countryâs most valuable retailer, Amazon, you can expect to receive e-mails past midnight followed by text messages asking why you havenât responded quickly enough. Americans today are taking less vacation time than at any point in nearly forty years, according to a recent analysis conducted by Oxford Economics for the U.S. Travel Association. The top reasons for not taking vacation are fear of losing oneâs job (being replaced) and fear of returning to a mountain of backlogged work. The New York Times editorial board endorsed programs like those at Volkswagen and Daimler, lamenting the âbabbling brook of emailâ and our ârelentless digital age.â
As clichéd as it is to wax lyrical about the sultry Spanish siesta, or the ambrosial French bistro lunch, we can learn a thing or two from the Europeans. Even countries like Bulgaria, South Korea, and Mexico are ahead of us in some respects: Of all thirty-four OECD nations, the United States ranks last for time off provided to new parents. Employers vary widely in their beneficence regarding paid parental leave, but any stabs at how many weeks are federally mandated? A quick calculation, carry the two, ah yes . . . none.
We canât fathom that there is anything but a direct correlation between productivity and number of hours worked. In fact, workers who are simply seen in the officeâcalled âpassiveâ face timeâare viewed as dependable and reliable, even more favorably if they are seen before or after regular work hours. So you could be cranking out reports left and right from your home office, or raking in clients while walking your dog in your PJs, but it wonât do squat for your image compared to parking your butt in that office chair.
On the flip side, workers who take all their vacation time are viewed as less dedicated by at least 15 percent of senior managers (the portion honest enough to admit it in a recent survey).
The American work ethic is second to none. But weâre in a quantity-versus-quality pickle. Because thereâs just one hitch: We have a limit. We arenât infinity pools. Like the bottomless chips and salsa at Chiliâs, there does exist a point at which more is actually not better.
For those of you who like your sweeping generalizations served with a side of data: A study by Business Roundtable found that, for the average team, there is such a sharp drop in productivity after working sixty-hour weeks for eight weeks that they would have gotten the same amount of work done had they just worked forty-hour weeks that whole time. At higher levels, the outputs equate much faster: When you get up to eighty-hour weeks, it takes just three weeks to match the output you would have produced averaging forty hours a week.
Although there is an amount of work that has a negative impact on output (errors, duplication, and the like), we refuse to accept it. Doing so goes against our national credo.
Everyone loves to talk about how people in the Nordic countries seem so darn happy all the time. They wear flowers in their hair and dance around maypoles and forage for weeds that they eat with lots of fish that make them live forever, etcetera, etcetera. They take like half a yearâs worth of vacation, get paid to spend some twenty months cuddling their newborns (even dads!), and have universal health care, free college, all that good stuff. (If it makes you feel better, they also have to deal with the worldâs smelliest food: a rotting fish called surströmming that won the stink factor award in a study of global cuisines. So Iâll take my apple pie any day.)
Then everyone else likes to retort that we Americans shouldnât be so envious or unrealistic about trying to become more like those countries because they are scarily homogeneous and have tiny populations. They donât have problems like the ones we have here in the United States.
I get it. I buy it all. And living there is probably not the fairy tale it seems like from across the Atlantic.
But to shed some perspective on ourselves and our penchant for working ourselves into a tizzy, itâs worth lifting up the hood on a less-overwrought dinner party conversation, and that is the Nordic concept of work itself.
I was on a hike with a Swedish friend, and she was talking about how stunned she is by the amount of time people work in the United States. On the positive side, she has noticed that many people here seem more passionate, creative, and entrepreneurial in their jobs compared with workers back home. Now, take this with a grain of salt since she lives in San Francisco and is surrounded by filmmakers and artists.
But she asked me a simple question about the sheer number of hours we work: Why?
She was absolutely dumbfounded when I explained: Putting in the time proves your value. She laughed at the idea and said, âIn Sweden, if youâre working more than the hours absolutely mandatory and expected of you, peopleâs reaction is, âWhatâs wrong with you that you couldnât get your work done in time?ââ In other words, itâs an efficiency questionââYouâre working late tonight? Oh, you must be slow.â
I stopped in my tracks. Mind blown.
This Swede had just taken something so elemental, so deeply engrained in my psyche, and turned it completely on its head.
While this perspective is profound, itâs actually not true that weâre all terribly inefficient in America. In fact, Iâd say weâre efficient to a fault. Weâre so outcomes orientedâfuriously multitasking and optimizing our routines and our tasks to have as much to show for our time as possibleâthat we often miss out on the experience itself. Rarely do we allow ourselves to take the scenic route. The real problem is that weâve married that efficiency orientation with our natural bent toward excess. After all, weâre the super-sized nation, with the biggest portions, the biggest cars, the biggest home theaters. Consensus is, more-is-better also applies to hours of work.
Our industriousness is arguably our economic edge around the globe. And it stems from the very core of our national identity: the American Dream. In school and in childrenâs books, weâre taught from a young age that thereâs nothing more heroic than the self-made man. You can do anything if you put your mind to it. So the long hours arenât just for show. In the United States, theyâre for self-worth.
Given this landscape, what is the future of food because of work, and food at work?
What Is a Meal?
Market researchers and their clients are often shocked when they hear what people consider a meal, compared with how they actually eat. Michael Barry, a professor at the Stanford University School of Mechanical Engineering, is also founder of Quotient Design Research, an innovation consulting firm that conducts ethnographic research to understand consumer behavior. When Barry has asked consumers how they define a âmeal,â they describe a combination of foods, home-cooked and plated. This sounds about right to me too. But when he asks them the last time they had a meal like that, responses vary from âa couple of weeks agoâ to âmaybe Thanksgiving.â One of the fundamental themes of eating behavior is that there is a difference between what people say they want and what they actually eat. Itâs often the difference between intention and action, between goals and reality.
But increasingly, the difference is due to the fact that, like TV dinners and delivery pizza before them, snacks have overhauled the definition of a meal in America. A major change in how we eat is that snacks have begun to dominate our main meals. Today, we are more likely to cobble together several prepackaged foods than, say, buy the necessary ingredients and assemble a sandwich. A packet of almonds, a bag of chips, a bar, a yogurt, and there you have it: lunch. Again letâs hear from Harry Balzer: âAre you too lazy to make a sandwich to put in your kidâs lunch bag, for Godâs sake?â He answers his question with a yes.
Weâre not only assembling snack foods to collectively equal âa meal,â weâre eating more snack foods altogether. As âgrazingâ has been taken to a new level, snacks have assumed a greater role in our lives than ever before. The experts at the Hartman Groupâa consumer research firm in Bellevue, Washington, that specializes in advising food and beverage companiesârefer to this phenomenon in American culture as âthe dissolution of meals.â Their research has found that a whopping half of all eating occasions are now snacks.
You can consider a snack âanything small, increasingly nutritional and portable that complements or replaces a meal.â This definition, offered in The Wall Street Journal, succinctly covers all the bases.
Some people forgo the traditional three squares in favor of more frequent, smaller amounts throughout the day. (Itâs all a little murky whether to designate these as âlarge snacksâ or âmini meals.â) This style of eating is driven by some nutritionists and health professionals who endorse it for boosting metabolism, keeping blood sugar steady, and avoiding the overcompensation that can happ...
