Limits on things that taste good

Matt Pearl

During a certain period of my childhood in the 1980s, a lot of people began the inexplicable practice of using an air popper to prepare unsalted, unbuttered flavorless bowls of popcorn.

The 80s represented a continuing chapter in the post 1950s saga of eating repulsive food for the purpose of limiting intake of things that actually taste good.

We’re still living in this same era. We take the fat out of milk to make it healthy; we have blamed salt for everything short of the crisis in North Korea; we demonize butter –– poor, unsuspecting butter, which has been largely replaced by solidified vegetable oil that has been dyed yellow and squirted into a plastic tub.

It’s all for health, right? We all feel better, right? Sure! I mean our grandfathers ate sausage and eggs for breakfast every day, never watched their salt and didn’t believe dinner was dinner without meat and potatoes. Poor saps: most of them only lived up into their 80s. They could have hit 92 with a little more dietary discipline.

Of course, it’s only fair that we factor in the hard physical labor many of them completed on a daily basis. And the fact that they ate seasonal fruits and vegetables for reasons of availability. Those truths could factor into the discussion somewhere.

Anyway, back to the flavorless, dry popcorn.

It was a treat –– a boring distortion of how an actual treat should taste, but still a special snack we made often of an evening as we spent family time together. In fact, I would argue the only thing that made the popcorn bowl a treat at all was the fact that the family shared it during my sister and my formative years.

There were other dietary and practical trends of the Reagan years that I remember fondly. I remember switching to skim milk, and eventually switching back. The first time I poured it on my cereal and saw that it resembled murky water, I knew this change wouldn’t last around my dad.

Skim milk resembles the fluid produced when a person rinses out a paintbrush that has been applying white paint to something. Want to really make America great again? Put the fat back in your milk.

Then one day in the 90s, I looked around and the entire domestic population was sustaining itself dietarily on a substance called oat bran. They based cereal brands specifically upon the presence of oat bran. The Quaker Oats Corporation proudly declared that their product had featured oat bran since day one. It was a miracle preventive measure/cure for disease, the solution for those struggling to lose weight and it tasted good, too.

As ridiculous as it all sounds now, those were wonderful years in my life. Bland popcorn and helpings of oat bran cereal slathered in milk-water haven’t left me too damaged –– we were all just trying to be healthy, falling victim to a reactionary press, which seemed ready always to take a single dietary study and pronounce it the grand solution to sickness.

I try also to remember that we are not immune to these types of diet trends taking over our lives. I think one of my favorites now is the organic trend. The term supposedly refers to plants grown without use of pesticides or certain chemical fertilizers, but really I think it comes from Latin for ‘overpriced.’

I guess it’s a sign that you and I live in a country of wonderful abundance: we have so much food that we can create political and scientific camps of divided opinions upon diet. Starving folks don’t have the luxury of reading food fact labels, I guess.

Anyway, this has inspired me to gather up the family, put a movie on and pop some corn–-buttered, that is.

Matt Pearl owns and operates newspapers in King City, Albany, and Grant City.