Food trends of late have highlighted the importance of eating a bit more like our grandparents, at least when our goal is eating healthy. 

Even Michael Pollan is on the record as saying, “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” But it turns out, millennials don’t actually eat healthy the way their grandparents do, at least not if their grandparents are baby boomers.

A new survey from the International Food Information Council Foundation compared perceptions of healthfulness along generational lines and showed some blatant differences between the way baby boomers and millennials approach healthy eating.

First off, boomers and millennials aren’t even looking for the same things when they define a food as “healthy.” Whereas boomers are keeping an eye out for foods that help manage weight, cardiovascular health, and digestive health, millennials seek out superfoods with specific benefits, such as foods that improve mental health, augment muscle health, and boost immunity.

Millennials and boomers also look to different professionals for advice when their goal is eating healthy. Boomers are far more likely to rely on registered dietitians, nutritionists, and healthcare professionals than millennials, who seek out fitness professionals, farmers, and bloggers for much of their healthy eating advice.

But perhaps the biggest difference the survey found was the specific strategies that each individual group used for assessing whether their diets were healthy or not — boomers appear to take on a quantitative definition, reducing portion sizes or eliminating carbs, sugars, and sodium to eat healthier. Millennials, on the other hand, define healthy eating less by what they don’t eat and more by what they do.

The term “superfood” only emerged around fifteen years ago, according to the Wall Street Journal, and millennials make many of their dietary choices by seeking out these nutrient-rich foods, rather than cutting out specific food groups. Millennials are also far more tapped into not only what a food is, but how it is produced: a 2012 article in Forbes highlighted artisanal, small batch, and specialty products as keys to a millennial heart — and stomach.

Organic is yet another label that millennials love, according to another recent survey, this time from the Organic Trade Association, Food Business News reports. This survey showed that an overwhelming 52 percent of organic shoppers are millennials with children, as opposed to a mere 14 percent of boomers who shop with the organic label in mind.

But according to Laura Batcha, CEO and executive director of the Washington-based Organic Trade Association, this choice actually has everything to do with millennials’ Gen X parents.

“Many (millennials) were raised on organic products,” she says. “It’s not a new idea they’re embracing; it’s just something that’s incorporated into their way of thinking.”

Add the familiarity of the organic label to the desire to shop healthfully, ecologically, and sustainably that seems to pervade the millennial sensibility, and it’s no surprise that millennials are eating differently than their grandparents. And what’s more, as millennials begin to acquire the power of purchase that baby boomers are slowly giving up, this distinction is going to continue to change the way the rest of us shop and eat, too.

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The signs seem to be everywhere: We are becoming a more frugal nation that needs to be fed deals and discounts as we plow through increasingly difficult financial times.

According to a new report by the Associated Press, frugality is the now the new norm in America and it stems from necessity. We are working less and earning less while the costs of food, schooling and housing remain pressing obligations we struggle to meet. So everyone seems to be cutting back across the board – white collar, blue collar, affluent, illegal.

The report finds consumer spending will never return to pre-recession levels, unlike what we witnessed after all other recessions since World War II when thriftiness took a back seat to the demand for new cars and shiny goods.

But this recession has taken such a huge bite out of spending and our old ways, Baby Boomers are unlikely to return to the affluenza that got us here in the first place. While the new frugality is good for the family budget and the planet, it is hurting the national economy including everyone associated with the housing market (sellers, contractors, laborers, suppliers) as well as gardeners, handymen and domestics.

And anyone who hangs at the local mall has seen how quiet things are, as shoppers buy what they need and buy it on sale rather than loading up on seasonal items they can do without.

The auto industry has seen a huge decline, from sales of cars and trucks averaging 16 million a year in boom times to a recession level of 10 million a year. The result could be further consolidation among auto makers and a loss of new vehicle taxes that aid state and local governments.

The report cites a Gallup survey taken last month which found seven in 10 Americans are cutting weekly expenses consistently through the summer. This is linked to the worst downturn since the Depression with unemployment currently at 9.7 percent and rising to double digits before the end of the year. Those who have jobs are earning less and have lost sizable percentages of their investment nest eggs.

We have always seen frugal behavior in some Americans, those wise enough to save more than they spend, to reuse what they can, to eat leftovers and take public transportation, turn off the lights and the heat and air whenever possible. Without even knowing it, those people are the real deal when it comes to being green. And now as the rest of us jump onto that bandwagon, they can proudly say, “I told you so.”

Image: timparkinson

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