Why Do So Many Food Documentaries Seem to Think We’re Stupid?

There’s a question that has been rattling around my mind ever since I watched Netflix’s “You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment” back in January: Why are so many TV shows and documentaries so eager to inform us that eating fruits and vegetables is better for our health, and for the environment, than the stuff many of us eat instead?

To be fair to “You Are What You Eat,” it does offer slightly more than this: It clearly wants to persuade you to eat less meat. The docuseries uses sets of identical twins to explore how different diets affect overall health; of each pair, one is assigned a vegan diet and the other a “healthy” omnivorous diet. The sisters Wendy and Pam, for instance, are told by a fitness expert that they could be at risk for diabetes, then informed, as though they might not have heard this before, that “nutrition will help that a great deal, as well as exercising.” They return in the final episode, in which they’re expected to have gained muscle and lost fat. Pam, on the vegan diet, has lost around eight pounds, most of it muscle; Wendy, on the omnivore diet, has lost about three, all of it muscle. They confess to not following their meal plans perfectly. Unsurprisingly, being told the “correct” thing to eat didn’t instantly reshape their lives.

You can tell that the assembled experts who proceed to admonish them are straining to be diplomatic, but it only makes them seem patronizing. How else could someone sound while telling you what you already know, as if you didn’t already know it? Fruits and vegetables are healthy dietary choices. Exercise is good for you. Most of us have fully absorbed these messages by the time we hit third grade. And yet television still reminds us of them with a muted arrogance and a patronizing smile. “You Are What You Eat” is just one popular example — in Netflix’s top 10 shows the week of its release — among many: Recent times have also brought us “Feeding Tomorrow,” “Live to 100,” “Poisoned,” “Beyond Weight Loss,” “Eating Our Way to Extinction” and many more.

This programming may be well-meaning, informative or even inspiring, but much of it strikes me as deeply misguided in its tone. It’s true that the American diet is in dire need of intervention: We as a nation eat too much ultraprocessed food, too much sugar and saturated fat. It’s also true that industrial meat production is a worrisome driver of climate change and pollution. But the idea that people might be led to change their diets simply by telling them these things would seem to be disproved by the evidence all around us: Most of us already know this, and yet we eat what we do. The audience for these programs is presumably full of people who already think about nutrition and the environment — say, the rigorously healthy omnivore who, watching “You Are What You Eat,” considers cutting out meat once and for all. Yet these shows often seem to imagine another kind of viewer entirely: the benighted who think a fiber-free, sugar-and-burgers diet is as good as any other and simply need a television show to inform them that they are wrong.

There is, however, a pretty simple fact that this programming feels hesitant to really reckon with: Most people do not eat for the purpose of achieving maximum health. We eat things because they taste good, because they are convenient, because they are affordable, because they are satisfying. It’s not as though modern food programming is unaware of this; it will often note the poor choices available to the average person, critiquing cynical fast-food companies or grocery stores full of ultraprocessed foods. But it still seems to imagine that someone watching might be persuaded via health data to navigate this landscape differently — as if you, the viewer, were a living spreadsheet, optimizing your diet so you can live forever in pure, unreflective efficiency.