Research

What’s fascinating to me is how we think about our bodies, how we change our idea of what’s healthy or what’s strong or what’s attractive often because new technologies make things possible. I grew up in a world where bodies mattered — my mother had polio; my father’s a competitive weight lifter. Bodies create limits and people struggle to transcend those limits.

I’m not a spokesperson for sugar. But it fascinates me that we’ve really made sugar this terrible thing that has to be avoided at all costs. No one woke up in 1953 and said, "I weigh too much, I should replace the sugar in my food with a chemical that has no calories and will therefore make me healthy." It was smart marketing. Our ideas about feeling better and living longer have been sold to us by people who stood to make a lot of money, and did. And in the end, arguably, [what they sold to us] didn’t make us healthier than we were in the beginning.  

People now think about health as a matter of making virtuous decisions. They may be uneasy about using artificial sweeteners. Yet it’s hard for them not to use some sort of low-calorie product. So if saccharin’s bad, then maybe NutraSweet’s not that bad, or maybe Splenda is better. Sugar has become a bad choice, yet it only has 18 calories in a teaspoon. Artificial sweeteners are still, for many people, good choices even though they intensify our craving for sweets and, according to recent research, may lead to weight gain. Yet it’s hard to give them up and simply eat food with calories — less food, less often. 

I am not a food purist: everything in moderation. I grew up drinking lots of diet soda and Crystal Light. In my house there were substitute ingredients all the time in our foods. These days I don’t use artificial sweetener. The food industry surrounds us with the message that we should want to eat and drink all the time, and that this will somehow make us happier. They have to, to achieve the market growth — the profit — they desire. I don’t want my money supporting those messages and practices. I do drink soda — but I’ll open the can and often just drink half of it. 

When we take a food product from the lab to the pantry, everything that happens in between is called culture. This is what marketers and product designers and store display managers consider when they look for the best way to get you to desire something, walk into a store, and walk out with it. But this isn’t why we buy. We have to also consider our own values: where we come from, our ethnic communities, how we learned about food. Then there’s our social and emotional environment: Are we depressed, lonely, and of course the physiology of eating including taste and desire. All of these things come together in that deceptively simple word, “choice.” It is what makes it so difficult to make a choice that pleases us and is healthful at the same time.

People rarely build a new technology in order to make something worse. The tomato harvester may have given us terrible tasting produce, but it was designed by people who had very different motivations. In the 1950s, many in the tomato industry were worried that the Bracero program would come to an end, and along with it Mexican labor. In this climate, UC Davis brought together a tomato guy who understood seeds, an engineer who knew how to design machines and a local machinist from the community who knew how to build farm implements. Together they built this controversial but labor-saving tomato harvester. It enabled all of them to think differently, and enhanced everyone’s prestige when the machine ultimately worked. A good tasting tomato was not what they were after; a tomato that could be picked by the machine — that proved their theories — that was the goal. And they achieved it.

We live in a society that demands that we constantly increase our consumption. We think of economic health as people buying stuff.  Buying items with a credit card, that you can’t afford, is like running artificial food through your body that it can’t use. One way we can all feel more virtuous about our excess consumption is by buying green products and recycling. But this is just scratching the surface of the larger problem, which is that we over-consume. 

We have to be able to ask not just how can we improve the science of health, or the policies of economic growth, but how can we understand the people who inhabit those bodies and who make those market choices? Humanists are good at this last part. To answer the big questions confronting us now, scientists, social scientists and humanists need each other. I enjoy directing the UC Davis Humanities Institute, where we help create these sorts of collaborations. I see the challenge as figuring out the common questions we are asking, across fields, so that our research has the greatest impact. This cross-disciplinary work is one of the most exciting things about working within a system with the breadth and creativity of UC.