One of the knock-on effects of the 9/11 attacks was the end of mass cigarette smoking in the United States. Michael Bloomberg (as a Republican, for once) surprisingly won the 2001 NYC mayoral election, after the primaries were delayed (the attacks occurred on a Tuesday) and the entire country tilted right. Within two years, Bloomberg had banned indoor smoking throughout the city, and the rest of the country switched off its tobacco chimneys in seemingly less time.

Cigarettes were a peerless public health menace: Provably unhealthy, unpleasant to be around, and socially scorned (hell, they even made everyone look older!). Just as it’s possible there’ll never be another computing device as revolutionary as the smartphone, it’s possible and even likely that we’ll never have such an unmistakable villain to take down. But there’s been plenty of candidates.

Drinking

Alcohol, the most obvious one and already the locus of a campaign that somehow amended the unamendable U.S. Constitution twice, surprisingly took a while to be villainized on pure health grounds, but even it couldn’t provide the same “high” as showing how awful cigarettes were. For all its deleterious effects, booze consumption doesn’t track linearly with mortality—it famously follows a “checkmark” graph, with modest consumption associated with longer lifespan compared to zero consumption.

This isn’t about alcohol being good for you so much as it is about wealth being associated with the types of settings and events in which someone would likely consume at least a little alcohol. Moreover, most alcohol is bought and drunk by a smaller sliver of people; hardcore consumption, the tall right size of that checkmark, is a niche hobby.

Eating

Compared to drinking, much more venom has been injected toward food as the origin of all ailments, the heir presumptive to the cigarette. Fat, salt, and sugar, roughly in that sequence, have been heaped with scorn, with gluten along for the ride at various junctures.

Alan Levinovitz chronicled this strange history in his wonderful The Gluten Lie. There’s no widely eaten food, consumed in any quantity, that can match the harm of even modest cigarette smoking. Sorry! But no matter, scaremongers have moved on to “processed food.”

What’s “processed food”? We hear the term constantly but like “premium” or “all natural” in the U.S., it has no legal meaning. But the implication of its usage is clear: We’ve fallen from some Eden of perfect, healthy agriculture and now we’re poisoning ourselves with chips, white bread, GMOs, and so on.

It’s an appealing tale, but ultimately just that: A story, more so than a factual account. I was happy to see a New York Times editorial from Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg highlighting how the “processing” of processed food gives us more accessible and longer-lasting foodstuffs:

It’s true that the bagel’s cream cheese, made velvety with carob bean gum and shelf-stable and mold-free with potassium sorbate, is considered ultraprocessed. But the idea that ultraprocessed foods are categorically unhealthy is an oversimplification. While eating too many highly processed sugary and fatty foods is bad for you, research has also shown that many ultraprocessed foods, such as yogurt, whole-grain bread or ready-to-eat plant-based burgers, are not linked to worse health outcomes and may even be beneficial. … dumping industrial food from your plate would do little to change things for the better and, in some cases, would actually make it worse. Food that is local, organic and low-tech is vastly more expensive than food grown through conventional methods. There is little evidence that it is healthier. And when it comes to environmental impact, it matters much more what is produced than how it is produced; tofu is going to have a smaller ecological footprint than beef. That holds true even if the tofu comes from soybeans grown on giant farms using pesticides, and the beef is grass-fed and organic

I feel like we often want to get rid of many of the very things that make our lives comfortable, industrial agriculture and fossil fuels most of all. But unlike the totalizing, no-drawbacks bliss of collectively quitting cigarettes, there’s no untainted joy in getting rid of things even as tainted as alcohol and the Round-Up Ready corn it’s made from. Doing so won’t make us more moral or even healthier. There’s no use in self-flagellation (ironically, from people who often shrug off all religion) to chase the high of banning cigarettes from all NYC establishments in 2003.