Only 7 Foods The Experts Won't Eat? Really?

I was prepared to completely blow off this article, "The 7 foods experts won't eat," as being a silly fluff filler piece for Yahoo's content network.  Until I saw that it was written by the Editor-In-Chief of Prevention magazine, who ought to know better!

Vaccariello spoke to seven experts and asked them "What foods do you avoid?"  The answers are unsurprising if you have been following the latest health news.  Non-organic potatoes and non-organic apples are known to carry a heavy pesticide load, and we have been talking about the Bisphenol A in can liners for ages.  

What vexes me about this article is that it picks on fresh fruits and vegetables, and let's face it, despite the pesticide load, Americans would be a lot healthier if they ate more apples and fewer Big Macs.  Why rank on fresh potatoes when the average American eats at McDonald's, and supports an entire Hot Pocket industry?

This is yet another example of the prescriptivist, finger-wagging health industry that turns people off.  The article presumes that you already know the ten thousand other things that you aren't supposed to eat.  So here are seven more to add to your list!  

This is the kind of thing that makes people throw their hands in the air and exclaim, "Why bother?  We're all gonna die some day!  Pass me the Cheetos!"

Articles like this instill a bone deep feeling of futility.  If we can't eat apples, what else is left?  This is the point where I start wishing that there was a magic food pill you could take, which would give you your entire day's nutrition in one shot.  Or Futurama's "Bachelor Chow."  Except that this would represent a further corporatization of America's food supply, and that's bad, too!  

The opposite of this article is the New York Times' "11 Best Foods You Aren't Eating," which was published almost two years ago, but is still going strong.  This article also relied on the "gotcha" factor, but in a positive way.  It has all the breathless "you'll never guess!" of a local news show's teaser ad, without the crushing sense of shame.

I'm not one to whitewash reality.  I appreciate learning about things like Bisphenol-A being in the liners of canned food, and being more easily released in response to acidic foods.  I had known about that already, but judging by the reactions of most people who have read the "7 Foods" article, it was not in common knowledge.  And I wish I could remember where I read that doctors were recommending that pregnant women and young children abstain from non-organic apples due to the pesticide levels on their skins.  

The problem is that these fear mongering articles do nothing more than spread FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doom) without offering anything more than the most superficial overview of the topics involved.  They simply add to the anxiety of trying to eat in the modern world, what Michael Pollan refers to as "the omnivore's dilemma."  (How do you decide what to eat, if you can eat anything?)