Kima Cargill - The Psychology of Overeating: Food and the Culture of Consumerism

The Psychology of
Overeating

The Psychology of
Overeating

Food and the Culture
of Consumerism

BY KIMA CARGILL

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

For Carsten, my culinary muse and the one I can count on for thrift, moderation, and joy.

G rowing up in the American South, I was raised on an extremely sweet and indulgent diet. My dad ate the cattlemans breakfast of eggs, bacon, hot cakes, maple syrup, and hash browns at the Cattlemens Cafe in Oklahoma City every weekday morning for fifty years. As kids we woke up on Saturday mornings and like many American children watched cartoons while eating cereal. My dad fixed us great big bowls of Fruity Pebbles with half and half. For laughs I recently calculated the nutritional content of our Saturday morning breakfasts. Two large bowls of Fruity Pebbles contain around 550 calories. A cup of half and half is 315 calories (the nutritional information is given by the tablespoon since its not intended to be used as well, milk). My estimate is that our entire Saturday morning breakfast was nearly 900 calories, 45 grams of sugar, and 28 grams of fat. We were under 10 years old.

Candied desserts such as pralines, fudge, divinity, nut brittles, and an Oklahoma specialty called Aunt Bills were extremely popular in my growing up. These desserts, if youve never had them are simply different variations of caramelized sugar and butter, and they were a staple of our diet. I have heard a number of people over the years taste something and say thats too sweet. I myself have never, ever had that thought about anything. I have never tasted anything that I thought was too sweet.

Trying to understand and manage my intense liking for sweets eventually led me to the study of nutrition and overeating. In the course of my career, Ive been surprised to find that unraveling the determinants of overeating has required me to consider psychology, philosophy, economics, neuroendocrinology, history, labor, and government regulation. What I share with you here is the culmination of nearly two decades of research, clinical work, and contemplation.

I n 2001, I was completing a clinical residency which was the final requirement of my doctoral program in psychology. My dissertation was finished and I was on the academic job market. As was my custom, I had gotten everyone at work caught up in various food competitions, taste tests, and nutritional debates. One day at a meeting, Marie van Tubbergen offhandedly suggested that I should teach a class on the psychology of food. Our supervisor Linda Vincent chimed in saying it was a fantastic idea. I scoffed at the suggestion, saying that there was no such thing as psychology of food. After the meeting, I went to my office and Googled psychology of food and to my surprise found a modest, but well-respected literature to which I had never been exposed. It was a cruel irony to discover in the final days of my graduate training that three of the things I was most passionate about: psychology, nutrition, and food were connected in ways I had never thought about.

A few weeks later, I was at a job interview at the University of WashingtonTacoma. One of the questions I was asked was what I might teach as a dream class. I hesitatingly answered that someone had recently suggested I teach a course on the psychology of food. The interview committee went bananas over the idea. Later I was offered the position of Assistant Professor. When I arrived on campus the next fall, everyone kept asking when I would be teaching Psychology of Food. I started developing the class, thinking that it was somewhat of a lark, never expecting that I would be conducting any research in the area. In short order, however, I found myself far more passionate and interested in food studies and slowly it began taking over my research agenda. Many university departments would not have been supportive of an early career shift in research focus, but the colleagues and dean of my interdisciplinary department were behind me 100 percent.

In those early days, many people literally burst out laughing when I said that I studied the psychology of food and eating. Little did I know then that the study of food was about to explode. I discovered a small group of interdisciplinary food scholars in the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS) and began attending their annual conference. The folks in ASFS were and are tremendously inspiring and supportive. Warren Belasco and Ken Albala in particular were incredibly welcoming and encouraged me in my early work. Now thanks to them and the work of people like Marion Nestle, David Kessler, Robert Lustig, David Ludwig, Michael Moss, and Michael Pollan, food studies is a well-respected critical field of inquiry. Those scholars are the giants whose shoulders I stand on.

I also thank Ricardo Ainslie for his mentorship during graduate school. Rico taught me the interpretive art of psychoanalytic inquiry and how to bring the rich history of psychoanalysis into cultural, political, and ethnographic analysis. I am also very grateful for the work of Tim Kasser, Irving Kirsch, and Allen Frances, none of whom I know personally, but whose work has profoundly shaped my thinking about psychology.

I owe much of my career success to my friend and mentor Cynthia Duncan, who helped me navigate the politics of academia, has been a staunch supporter of my work, and has provided countless laughs along the way.

There are so many people at the University of Washington Tacoma who have supported my work and offered encouragement: Nita McKinley, Jennifer Sundheim, Leighann Chaffee, and Bill Kunz have been especially supportive.

I appreciate the folks at Zoka Coffee in Tangletown for letting me camp out there for a year and a half, especially Morgan Johnson and Sandy Metzger who were always keen to talk about nutrition when I needed to run an idea by someone.

Finally, I could not have written this book without Allison as a clinical case study. She has my deepest gratitude and compassion.

a To eat or drink; to ingest

b To use up (esp. a commodity or resource); exhaust

c To purchase or use (goods or services); to be a consumer of

d To spend (money), esp. wastefully; to squander (goods)

e To ruin oneself through excessive spending.

Consumption:

a The action or fact of eating or drinking something, or of using something up in an activity.

b Wasteful expenditure (of time, money, etc.).

c The purchase and use of goods, services, materials, or energy. Freq. opposed to production.

d The amount of goods, services, materials, or energy purchased and used.

Consumption:

a Polit. Econ. A doctrine advocating a continual increase in the consumption of goods as a basis for a sound economy.

b Excessive emphasis on or preoccupation with the acquisition of consumer goods.

Definitions from Oxford English Dictionary (OED Online, 2014).

I n 2012, Sea-Tac International Airport installed four water bottle refilling stations throughout the terminals. Such stations encourage the drinking of water, save money for travelers, and reduce the waste of single-use water bottles, of which Americans currently purchase 50 billion per year (Royte, 2008). A year later, as part of their Shop and Fly campaign, Sea-Tac posted large advertisements directly above those stations, depicting a Frappuccino-style drink topped with whipped cream and chocolate syrup, likely clocking in around 700 calories and 90 grams of sugar (Starbucks, 2014). The copy reads You deserve better than water and directs travelers to nearby Starbucks and Coffee Bean and Leaf. This picture-worth-a-thousand-words represents the paradox of be healthy and reduce waste vs. consume more because you deserve it. It is this paradox that defines the crisis now faced by the entire planet as affluent consumption has reached a tipping point resulting in increasingly dire psychological, physiological, and environmental consequences.