So, I’m perusing July’s Gourmet magazine (I mean, of course, I am…have you seen the picture of that cherry pie on the cover?), when I come across this startling (as in eyes bugging briefly outside of my head) bit of trivia:

One in five Americans live on a diet of ten foods or fewer.

OK? Pretty horrifying, yes? But, wait, it gets better:

Among the most common choices? French fries, fried chicken, chocolate chip cookies, and Kraft Macaroni & Cheese.

Now, it is possible to go on and on about how nice it must be in the Fat & Rich World to have a diet of ten foods, how it must be nice to have all that diversity. Fair enough. I’ll concede that, and more. But in the context of the United States, where the median income is $46,000 and 77% of us live in urban areas, something is horribly wrong if our fridges and cupboards hold nothing more than dehydrated cheese powder.

I am not a cook because I am a crusader for health (or, for that matter, the environment, whales, or gay rights), I am a cook because I believe in the power of food to expand our sense of who we are and where we are (see the DL About for more on this).

But this - whatever it is - isn’t healthy.

At the same time the Food Network is encouraging - successfully - thousands of people to stare slack jawed at the television, their brains spewing out the same alpha waves as they do when watching porn, as chef this-and-that gets her own show (and thousands, if not millions, of rabid fans), and as farmers’ markets explode in cities, suburbia, and exurbia (what we used to call “the country”), we discover how very little all that exertion really matters. Of course, only in the byzantine recesses of this nation’s educational bureaucracy does food ever correlate with statistics, and only then in terms of mouths to feed. But something is going on here.

It goes beyond the simple jeremiads about convenience, mechanization, the disconnect between food and land, economic, cultural, or racial proclivities, or media. But where isn’t clear. We’ve got to figure it out unless we be reduced to the nutrient pastes of science fiction: a single food applied quickly, leaving room only for the future.