Image by John Hain from Pixabay

If you were about to start a food detox program like the one I described I was doing in a previous blog post (click here to read that), what UNHEALTHY and BANNED food do you think you would have for your last meal before starting your healthy eating regimen? What guilty pleasure would be the last thing you would enjoy before embarking upon your food cleanse?

I’ll give you a moment to think about it. I certainly thought about it before I began my current food plan.

As I thought about my own about-to-be-abandoned favorites, I wondered about what most Americans would choose. What do you think are the most popular foods in the US today? I’ll give you another minute to think about that question.

So I went researching that issue. The data on this is fuzzy at best. However, this is what FoodHow claimed were the Top 10 Most Popular Foods in the US in 2023:

1. Pizza–Apparently, the average American eats 35-40 pizzas a year, which works out to about 1 slice a day. About 94% of people in the US say they eat pizza regularly (although my son is in the 6% category). We are definitely underconsuming in this area. I estimate we have pizza, like, once every other month.
2. Hamburgers—I expected this to be No. 1 on this list. Overall, Americans eat 50 BILLION burgers a year. According to FoodHow, the average American eats 150 hamburgers a year. Unbelievable! I’m not holding up my weight in burger consumption; I have a beef hamburger about once each season. That means someone else is eating my other 146 burgers in addition to their own 150!
3. Fried Chicken—Surprisingly enough (at least to me), about half of all Americans report eating fried chicken at least once every week! I guess they must be counting chicken nuggets and fried chicken filet sandwiches and such, but still, that’s a lot of fried chicken products.
4. Tacos—I was amazed that tacos appeared so high on the list. It seems that we eat 4.5 billion tacos per year. Restaurants say that tacos are the second-most-ordered food in US restaurants. Compared to the previous options, tacos almost seem like health food (at least they have some vegetables), so I guess it is a good thing that they are ranked so high.
5. French Fries–I find it hard to believe that Americans eat more tacos than french fries, but what do I know? I’m totally out of step with all these statistics. The total annual American french fry consumption also came to about that 4.5 billion figure, but in pounds rather than in items. That is about 130 medium fries orders at your standard fast food place PER PERSON.
6. Hot Dogs–I totally forgot about this food item. Americans eat 7 billion hot dogs in a year, averaging out to 50 hot dogs per person.
7. Oreos–Not really a meal item, at least for me. But American eat 34 billion Oreos per year.
8. Grilled Cheese–A study in 2009 found Americans eat a total of 2.2 billion grilled cheese sandwiches annually.
9. Mac and Cheese–Statistically, each American eats 14 pounds of mac and cheese in a year. The blue box company sells more a million of their product EVERY DAY.
10. Ice Cream–I will admit that I’ve made a meal from only ice cream. But NOT VERY OFTEN. The average for US ice cream consumption is 22 pounds a year, for a grand national total of 1.6 billion gallons.

So that’s kind of a scary picture of American food preferences, at least to me. To put it in perspective, the average American annual consumption of apples, the most popular fruit in the country (depending on how you count things), was slightly under 16 pounds in 2022. But a lot of that is apple juice and applesauce.

True Confessions: This is not to say that I don’t eat those things; I do. I eat all of those things. But only on an occasional basis. And I mostly eat the healthiest versions of them, like made from pastured-raised beef or chicken, or homemade pizza or mac and cheese or grilled cheese with healthy local cheese, or no-nitrate hot dogs, etc. I love the taste of all of them. But I know they aren’t good for my body. Eating them rarely makes me appreciate them all the more when I do have them. But making a diet of them is not good for me or for the planet. But I also know I’m financially and socially privileged enough to be able to make different choices. There is a terrible problem in this country of “food deserts” in poorer communities that have no grocery stores, let alone farmers markets, and whose food dollars go to the cheapest calories per dollar, not the most nutritional. So I’m not trying to be judgemental. But still, a lot of those burgers and pizzas and such are being consumed by people who could make different choices. Just saying…

So back to you. Would your final meal before going on a restricted diet be one of the above? Share your favorites in the comments. Any guesses what the main dish in my last “free” meal was? I’ll let you know in a future post.