The Shape of a Nation’s Diet

It was the late 90s and my mother was eating cottage cheese and canned pineapple. A year earlier, she had ended her grapefruit diet, where for months she ate half a grapefruit for most meals and a small bowl of Grape-Nuts when hunger pains set in, a combination that implied the alchemy of two foods with grape in their name would somehow melt the fat off her already slim waist. We lived in a small city in Iowa. It felt like a suburb: all strip malls, fast food chains, ranch-style houses, a “business district” with brutalist government buildings, and a few busy streets.