Think about the humble oat. If you grew up in the United States, chances are you were given rolled oats for breakfast at some point in your life, perhaps the Old Fashioned Quaker Oats that come in cardboard cylinders or the boxes of instant packets that include varieties like Apples & Cinnamon or Maple & Brown Sugar (childhood favorites of mine). These flavors, according to the brand website, are the “Classics,” while more recent varieties—in our age of what food writer Michael Pollan has called “nutritionism,” or a focus on nutrients as opposed to the food itself—include “High Fiber” or “Fiber & Protein” alongside the now-ubiquitous “Gluten-Free.” Beyond Quaker oats, there are dozens of breakfast oat products now on the market, things I don’t think we had when I was a kid in the 1980s such as steel cut oats, oat bran, and even groats. What’s a groat? you might ask. Well, it’s simply an oat kernel. It’s a whole-grain oat. “Groat” is also used to describe the whole forms of other grains such as wheat, rye, and barley. 

When I first discovered the oat groat about a decade ago, I couldn’t help but laugh. “Groat” sounded like a portmanteau of “gross” and “oat.” Not exactly appetizing! But, as I discovered, oat groats are delicious. They’re chewy and hearty and creamy and nothing like the packaged instant oats, which simply use flecks of oats as a vehicle for delivering sugar and “flavors” and usually, in my experience, aren’t satisfying on their own as a breakfast meal.

The reason I found out about groats was because I had discovered a bag of “quick cook” steel cut oats at Costco some years ago and noticed that the ingredient list said “organic whole grain oats.” I then began to wonder a lot more about oats and oatmeal. I recalled that the familiar Quaker oats were “rolled” oats. So what exactly was the difference between the rolled oat and the “whole grain oat”? I was pretty sure this had never been explained to me, and in doing research to answer this question, I was led to a startling realization: the food products most readily available to us are often not the best, most nutritious, or most enjoyable forms of that particular food in existence. This is because the companies that bring us the things that we need and think we want are not interested in providing us with an enjoyable experience or a healthy food product. They are interested in profit. As Nathan J. Robinson wrote about Starbucks, for example, which serves “infamously disappointing” coffee that tastes burnt and “mass-produced” defrosted food:

Starbucks is a megacorporation, and it exists to make profits for shareholders, not to make the best coffee or treat people well. It will make good coffee to the extent that this goal coincides with making profits for shareholders, but if it’s more profitable to make bad coffee than good coffee, profit will always come first.

Like Starbucks, Big Food, or the large conglomerates whose products fill our grocery stores, offers us an array of edible products that are profitable to companies. Like any corporate product, corporate food has always been brought to us by advertising, which teaches us to want the things we want and to accept the choices we have been given—even when those choices can have deadly consequences. Recall that cigarette companies got medical doctors to advertise their (we now know) cancer-causing products in the early to mid-20th century. From the cereal industry pushing its newly sweetened, otherwise bland “anti-masturbation” corn flakes onto children in the first half of the 20th century to Wonder Bread, which the Federal Trade Commission found in 1973 to have engaged in false advertising for making claims about the supposed health benefits of its bread, to current-day soft drink companies targeting their advertising to minority children, corporations are the driving force behind what we eat and drink every day, even if we don’t think much about it. Big Food is just part of the problem, though. The question of why we eat what we eat relates to time—or, more specifically, our lack thereof.

Time is a subject that interests me—and bothers me—so I tend to write about it. Whether thinking about the considerable time taken up by our jobs or the time needed to commute somewhere, it’s clear that our society runs on manufactured time scarcity. Sustenance, like everything else, must be squeezed into our lives. As Amanda Mull explained in the Atlantic in 2019, the Industrial Revolution standardized people’s work lives and thus their meal times. As a result, quick breakfast foods eventually displaced the more standard “bacon and eggs” breakfast to become the norm:

Industrially produced breakfast products, like cold cereal, yogurt, and instant oatmeal, dramatically reduced the time and effort required of working women [who were recruited to work around the time of World War II] to feed their family, and the skyrocketing sugar content and colorful mascots made them an easy sell to most kids (and, therefore, most harried moms).

Given the time squeeze, it’s not surprising that breakfast can be something of a hit-or-miss occurrence. According to pre-pandemic government statistics, about 15 percent of adults skipped breakfast on a given day. More recent statistics show that only about a quarter of teenagers eat breakfast every day. An obvious reason is lack of time. Or sometimes lack of appetite. But lack of appetite is really just an issue of time, at least for me personally. For instance, if I wake up not feeling hungry, chances are I will be within about an hour, so if I had more time in the morning to delay breakfast, that might be more enjoyable than forcing something down quickly in order to get out the door, which is what usually happens.

As for lunch, in the United States, there is no federal requirement that employers give workers a lunch or coffee break. A 2021 Jacobin headline summed things up quite well: “A fast and mostly joyless lunch break has become the norm in just about every corner of the world.” In the article, Tom Ana explained that in today’s workplaces, the act of human nourishment must compete with the worker’s need to stay productive. Just check out videos on TikTok to see an assortment of lunch breaks taken in cars, on factory floors, in break rooms, or even in driveways (in the case of delivery workers). The lack of a leisurely lunch also makes it easier for convenience products (such as meal replacement shakes and other products) to be sold to us so that we can get in a quick meal fix while “maximiz[ing] a neoliberal model of personal efficiency.” As one customer testimonial for Huel instant meals, shakes, and powders reads: “In today’s world, life is pretty busy, and to have a suite of products that I can trust—that fill the gaps in times where I can’t get a full meal—gives me that level of assurance I feel really good about.” While I’m not into meal replacements per se, like many people, I rely on grocery frozen microwave foods quite a bit. But I don’t really feel good about it. There’s usually something else I’d rather be eating.

And this brings us to dinner. In “You’ll Never Get Off the Dinner Treadmill,” Rachel Sugar describes the problem of getting three meals into your mouth each day:

I can compromise on breakfast. It is absolutely normal to eat the same breakfast every single day for years, and equally normal to eat nothing. Lunch: Eat it, skip it, have some carrot sticks, who cares. Lunch is a meal of convenience. But dinner is special. Dinner isn’t just the largest meal in the standard American diet; it is the most important, the most nourishing, the most freighted with moral weight. The mythical dream of dinner is that after a hard but wholesome day at school or work, the family unit is reunited over a hot meal, freshly prepared. Even if you’re dining solo, dinner tends to be eaten in a state of relative leisure, signaling a transition into the time of day when you are no longer beholden to your job. 

While I disagree with Sugar over her willingness to compromise on breakfast and lunch—unless I am deliberately trying to fast, I prefer to have three proper meals daily—the struggle of “meal prep” is never-ending, no matter how many meals one eats each day. As a food enthusiast, I spend much of my time outside of work doing meal planning, grocery shopping, and cooking food and freezing it for later use or defrosting it at meal times. I understand why supermarket “fast” foods like breakfast bars, microwave meals, shakes, instant coffee, and the like are valuable. They’re easy to store, prepare, and consume, whether for a breakfast “on the go” or a caffeine hit to take on your morning commute or as part of a quick lunch or dinner. Putting aside the enjoyment factor and any nutritional downsides, such as high salt or sugar content, among others, there's nothing wrong with eating these things. Or with getting a meal kit or meal delivery subscriptions and services like Home Chef or Hello Fresh or the like. The point isn’t to shame people for their choices but to question the conditions that lead us to make these choices in the first place. And to ask: What do we miss out on by eating the things that we eat?

After discovering groats, I began reading up on oatmeal and found that the standard oats I had always seen were referred to as “rolled.” Rolled oats are steamed and flattened. There are different kinds—instant (cooks in under 3 minutes), quick-cook (cooks in 1-5 minutes), regular (cooks in 10-20 minutes), or extra thick. But what about other varieties? Well, there were the steel cut kind, which takes about 15-20 minutes to cook on the stovetop, and the quick cook steel cut, which takes about 7 minutes. (These were the ones Costco was selling.) Then there’s the funnily-named oat groat, which takes 30-60 minutes to cook on the stovetop (this can be reduced to 20 minutes of cooking time using a pressure cooker). So it turns out that the steel cut form, which is just cut-up groats, is less processed than the rolled form. The groat, then, is the least processed form of the grain and takes the longest to prepare. Once I put all of this together, I felt as if a lightbulb had gone off. When I was a kid, I just thought that oatmeal came in packets, that that’s just the way that oatmeal existed in the world. But instead, there was another reason I was eating those packets: the market provided people with things they were incentivized, due to time scarcity, to buy!

Also, I discovered that groats are relatively hard to find in physical grocery stores (nowadays, there are many places to get them online). Presumably, this is a sales issue. People aren’t going to buy what they don’t have time to prepare! I used to buy Bob’s Red Mill oat groats online, but the company stopped selling them, and other brands I have tried are not nearly as good. I called the company recently to ask why they stopped selling them around 2020, and the agent could not give me an exact reason but said that it either had to do with “sourcing” or “sales,” the latter meaning that they simply weren’t profitable.

The lack of availability of the whole oat groat is unfortunate. As I mentioned, not only do the groats taste better, but they are actually healthier for you than the more processed form. Whole grains in general cause less of a sugar spike in your bloodstream after you eat them compared to more processed forms. A diet with a high “glycemic index,” as it’s called, is one that spikes your sugar levels and predisposes to things like type 2 diabetes and heart disease, which are two of the most common (and often preventable) chronic conditions in American adults. Many commonly eaten foods have a high glycemic index—things like “white bread, rice cakes, most crackers, bagels, cakes, doughnuts, croissants, most packaged breakfast cereals”—so eating a bunch of these foods all the time is not ideal for health and longevity. (Ultra-processed foods—referring to ready-to-eat or ready-to-heat foods that include additives that are typically not found in home kitchens—have also been associated with cancer, which is now affecting people at a younger age.) These foods are also, as you’ll notice, some of the easiest and quickest foods to prepare and eat.

As is the case with oats, other commonly consumed foods such as coffee and bread are often sold to us in highly processed and “quick” forms that actually do not taste nearly as good as their “slower” versions. Like instant oats, which do not taste as good as groats, instant coffee granules or single-serve coffee pods do not, for the most part, even begin to do justice to coffee. And mass-produced supermarket bread—although the variety of offerings has improved over the years—is nothing like homemade or “slow” bread. Once you realize what good oats, coffee, and bread actually taste like, you may not want to go back to the “quick” stuff if you can help it.

Coffee beans come from East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, and around the 15th century, coffee began to be consumed in beverage form. Coffee is widely consumed in the U.S., and its more recent history in the country is often referred to in “waves.” The first wave was the 1800s, when coffee became a commodity and products like instant coffee and Folger’s came onto the market. In the 1970s, the second wave refers to the rise of coffee shops like Starbucks and espresso-based coffee drinks. And the 2000s, or third wave, was when coffee became similar to wine, a product that consumers pick for its taste profile and origins. Home-brewed coffee has grown in popularity in recent years, in part due to the early pandemic years when people either stayed home or worked from home and needed to make coffee themselves instead of going to their favorite coffee shop. This has led to a big demand for specialty beans and single-cup home brewing devices such as the V60 pour over and the AeroPress, which uses a kind of plunger to make the coffee, as well as grinders and other accessories.

The popularity of coffee due to its caffeine content is obvious. But it has always struck me how bad coffee can be, and I’ve always assumed that people tolerate bad coffee (such as Starbucks) because they mostly want it for the caffeine. Whether brewed in a fancy drip machine (trust me, I used to use one of these) or a pod, coffee, to me, often tastes burnt or bitter or weak or leaves an unpleasant funky aftertaste on the tongue. I used to think that’s just how coffee was… until I tried a home-brew method (AeroPress) with home-ground beans that were freshly roasted. The result was mind-blowing. No more funk, no more bitterness, and even decaf tastes great. (Those of us who are sensitive to caffeine and don’t wish to consume so much of it need not suffer bad-tasting decaf anymore, and in my experience, decaf at Starbucks or coffee shops, in general, is usually not very good.) As James Hoffmann, a coffee expert, YouTuber, and former World Barista Champion, explains, the main factors when brewing coffee are the grind size and water temperature. The freshness of the beans is also key. So any brewing method that does not optimize these factors will not produce a great cup of coffee. Single-cup brewing is not too time-consuming once you have all your equipment ready, but sometimes even 5 or 10 minutes may be simply too much time to spend brewing a cup of coffee on a busy morning. But until you have tried this approach, you don’t really know what you’re missing. While there may not be specific health benefits to brewing at home versus not (assuming both methods make use of a filter, which is important to eliminate certain substances from the coffee), the taste and enjoyment alone make it well worth the effort.

As Michael Pollan explains in his book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, bread is a form of food that allows humans to extract energy from the seed (kernel) of a grass called wheat. In its most rudimentary form, early food processing of grass seeds by humans involved “toast[ing] on a fire or [grinding] between stones and then boil[ing] in water to create a simple mash.” The mash could also be cooked over fire to make a flatbread. Then, about 6,000 years ago, humans discovered leavening or the rising of the wheat that yields bread. Thus, bread is essentially “aerated porridge.” Leavening requires yeast and bacteria to produce gas to make the dough rise. Modern breadmaking takes advantage of commercial yeast, which was invented in the late 19th century, to provide the gas. Other “modern food science” bread hacks include “other leavening agents, sweeteners, preservatives, and dough conditioners.” Mass-produced bread uses these tricks to speed up the process of leavening but also to add taste to a dough that is simply not as tasty as slower bread such as sourdough, which can take days, from start to finish, in order to produce a complex and flavorful loaf. (This explains, Pollan writes, why the “last century, aka the Wonder Bread Era” has been “a notably bad time for bread.”)

In contrast, sourdough bread gets its flavor not from additives but from “some 200+ compounds” that reside in the bread’s many air pockets. These flavor compounds are detected in the back of our mouth and nose, where they are then sent to our brain, specifically areas that process memory and emotion. “Perhaps this helps explain,” Pollan speculates, “the keen pleasure we seem to take in all kinds of aerated foods and beverages: the sparkling wines and sodas, the soufflés and whipped cream, the lofted breads and ethereal croissants and weightless meringues, and the laminated pastries with their 128 layers of air.” It also turns out that sourdough bread has a lower glycemic index than standard bread. 

You may wonder why the fuss about bread, though. Many grocery stores now offer freshly baked bread in addition to mass-produced bread, and these products can be quite good. While more options are better—I use supermarket bread or bakery bread, not homemade, when I make certain recipes—the point of making your own bread is not just for taste or health but for the enjoyment of the experience. As Pollan writes,

I’ve come to love the feel of the dough in my hands as it develops, the way, on the third or fourth turn, the inert, sticky paste begins to cohere and then gradually become elastic, as if sinews and muscles were forming inside it. I love (and a little bit dread) the moment of truth when I lower the oven door to discover how much “oven spring” (if any) my loaf has achieved. And I love the muffled static the bread emits while it cools, as the interior steam crackles the crust during its escape, filling the kitchen with that matchless air.

While not everyone wants to cook, it is another human experience that often escapes us in modern life. Similar to foraging for mushrooms, as Andrew Ancheta wrote, making your own bread can bring you closer to your food sources and give you a greater appreciation for the fruits of the earth. He wrote:

Unlike the factory-farmed, mass-produced, and highly processed food products sold to us in stores, mushrooms are truly natural. In eating them, we are able to conceive of our human life as part of nature and the wider ecosystem, rather than something cut off from it.

Like many others during the early pandemic years, I got into sourdough for a little while. Basically, you mix water and flour (or buy a commercial “starter”) and let it bubble up and become fragrant over a few days. This means the microbes are actively producing flavor. Once your “starter” is ready, you can add it to recipes that call for “active starter.” While it can be great fun, sourdough itself quickly turns into a monstrosity. You need to “feed” it flour regularly so that the microbes in it won’t go dormant, and if you wish to store some of the excess mixture that is produced (called “discard”), you need fridge space. You also need time. But it does yield delicious pancakes, pretzels, breads, and crackers, and once you learn how to make homemade bread, you’ll be able to whip some up for guests or loved ones on a special occasion—or just a regular weeknight—and this can be very satisfying.

Our corporate food system limits our meal choices every day of our lives. In the richest country in the world, the same for-profit enterprises that have brought us processed supermarket food also have brought us fast food. Fast food drive-thrus arose in the mid-20th century in no small part due to car culture and the influence of pro-automobile industries on government policies that gave us highways and suburban sprawl. While an impressive variety of foods and cooking ingredients can be purchased online these days, which makes it easier than ever for home cooks to experiment with different cuisines, many of us tend to stick to the same things in a given week, often for convenience and especially at breakfast. Americans are eating alone more often, whether at home or in restaurants or in cars—and in any case, we’re often eating something that somebody else chose for us because it makes profit for shareholders. 

We should have better food and more affordable food and more time to prepare and enjoy our food. We need a public option for food and to reclaim cooking and eating and food itself as a basic good that should be provided for all.