D igestin g
the World
Eating right is certainly in the news these days. From fads like the South Beach Diet to the front-page image of the First Lady planting an organic vegetable garden on the White House
lawn, Americans are beginning to pay closer attention to
their eating habits. Staggering reports of the epidemic of
obesity are flooding the scientific community and serve
as fodder for TV shows like The Biggest Loser. One in five
children in the U.S. are obese today.
Some steps are being taken to correct this. 2010’s
Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act includes federally
mandated guidelines to improve nutritional standards
in schools in order to promote better food choices among
students. Many states like New York have recently
earmarked millions of dollars in state funds to boost
school meal reimbursements. It is now well recognized
that poor nutrition affects cardiovascular health and is
linked to the rising rates of type 2 diabetes and cancer.
But poor nutrition also directly affects the way our
children learn.
Why We Eat
While choosing what we eat is certainly critical to our
cognitive health, a truly holistic understanding of eating
goes much further, considering how we eat, where we
eat, when we eat and why we eat. So: Why do we eat?
I pose this question to children all the time, and they
giggle and stumble around for answers like “we eat so
we can grow.” But we are not just machines requiring the
right set of nutrients as basic fuel to keep going. We are
living organisms, not automobiles! In a recent workshop,
I asked participants to describe the taste of a blueberry.
No one could get far past the fact that they’re sweet and
blue. While scientists might accurately analyze all the
phyto-nutrients in a blueberry, this tells us very little
about the actual experience of eating one.
Eating is a deeply personal encounter. It conveys
something about ourselves at a particular moment in
time. It feeds our memory and points directly to who we
are, to our mood and temperament. Eating reflects our
basic sanity because it is how we make contact with the
world—how we exchange with the world. Our hunger to
grow and know the world is not just physical, but intel-
lectual and spiritual. Eating is how we become the world.
Industrially Fed, Spiritually Starved
If we take a minute to look at how we eat in America,
we begin to see how it directly relates to the modern
epidemics of childhood: obesity, allergies and ADHD. We
eat as if we are in a race. This is the real purpose of “fast
food.” It’s cheap and convenient, just like a roadside gas
station is for your car. But, again, we are living organisms, not automobiles. The same kind of assembly-line
mentality informs the way our children are force-fed
information in school. We’ve been led to believe that
education is a race, and that the fastest child is the
smartest. But in my 22 years as a developmental pediatrician watching children grow, I’ve found that this simply
isn’t true. Sometimes the smartest kid turns out to be the
one who took her time digesting the world. The current
trends in standardized education have left us with a
system that treats children as if they are USDA Grade A
