For American Palates, Food Preferences Remain Basically Unchanged : Nutrition: Personal choice and economics, not just health awareness, play part in what foods we eat.

Press reports to the contrary, we haven’t all abandoned iceberg lettuce for arugula and hamburgers for poached fish. The nation is split into two food camps and the reasons why tell us a lot about ourselves.

If you believe the style-page columnists, America is in the thick of the New Age of Food Consciousness. We’ve changed our food habits and preferences in dramatic ways, they tell us. Not only are we obsessed with eating more healthfully, we’re also becoming gastronomic sophisticates--healthy gourmets. These are dizzying times, but while the food “trendies” get most of the attention, they don’t get the lion’s share of the shelf space.

Indeed, if you visit the average suburban supermarket or restaurant strip, you will confirm what food-marketing researchers have been insisting for more than 15 years--despite all the hype, most people remain loyal to the American standard foods we’ve supposedly cut back on. Thus, a Gallup Poll of dinner-time restaurant patrons several years ago found that 59% would order plain corn as their most likely side dish, while only 8% would order the borderline-exotic zucchini vinaigrette. For the main course, 10-to-1 would opt for prime rib instead of blackened redfish.

While blackened redfish is pushing it, the majority also remains indifferent to far more serious trends. Even at the height of the 1989 Alar-pesticide-cyanide scare, 73% in one poll remained “completely or mostly confident” about supermarket food safety. Although just about everyone occasionally voices some worries, when it comes to shopping, cooking and eating, those who actually change their behavior rarely top a third of any sample, frequently less. Despite all the advice to eat more fiber, most Americans do not eat much whole-wheat bread, fresh fruit or broccoli.

The cholesterol news notwithstanding, the hamburger remains the fast-food favorite and fried potatoes the most popular side dish. The best-selling supermarket vegetable remains the tomato--usually gassed and rock hard--with iceberg lettuce the most popular (and least nutritious leafy green. Fewer than half of us have even tried frozen yogurt.

Why, one cannot help asking, given all that we’ve heard about health and nutrition, have most Americans been slow to change? What’s at the root of this recalcitrance?

For one thing, self-identity. Eating is not a purely pragmatic act done just to satisfy taste buds or nutritional needs--it’s loaded with social and emotional meanings. You are, after all, what you eat--or, perhaps more to the point, you are what’s on your plate.

This sentiment, behind some of the odder entries on chic healthy gourmet menus, works both ways. Flaunting hard-guts bravado, some people may enjoy appearing indifferent to danger. Before the counterculture went organic in the late 1960s--the roots of healthy gourmet cuisine--Bohemians often dismissed health as boring and bourgeois. Similarly, in the mid-1980s, some young punks derisively associated natural food with the older Woodstock generation.

Less consciously rebellious--and more pervasive--is the feeling that healthy food probably tastes bad. According to nutritional anthropologist Norge Jerome of the University of Kansas Medical Center, many people distinguish between food and nutrition.

Food should taste good, while nutrition is good for you but not much fun. For good taste, American standard favors consistency, bright colors and lots of crispy fat, salt and sugar. Nutrition, however, is associated with bad-tasting pills, slimy greens, weird organ meats and nuts and twigs. So ingrained is this perception that many old-school food-industry executives believe that the worst thing that can be said about a product is that it’s good for you.

Compounding such skepticism is considerable confusion about what is good for you. To the average skimmer of health news it may seem that just about everything causes cancer or heart disease. Worse, the experts seem constantly to be changing their minds--so why bother at all?

After a rash of findings concerning cholesterol, The Washington Post’s Meg Greenfield blamed her nutritional nihilism on the “They Institute of America.” First “they” told us to eat lots of milk, eggs and meat, then “they” told us to eat less of that and more fish, but then “they” told us to eat less fatty fish (due to mercury), and now “they” were telling us that the fattiest fish might reduce cholesterol.

“Nothing lasts,” Greenfield lamented. “No assertion has a shelf life of more than 11 months.”

Soon they would be telling us to eat more bacon, eggs and Twinkies--with extra salt.

Actually, the experts have been more consistent than Greenfield allows. The problems come from the things “they” don’t know enough about yet--particularly all the recently added chemicals that haven’t been adequately tested. But it’s no wonder it seems we’re doomed if we do, doomed if we don’t.

Other longer-running gender, ethnic and class patterns also play a part in the longevity of American standard. On the whole, men tend to be less health-conscious, perhaps because diet-related professions--especially nutritional science and home economics--were feminized in the late 19th Century, thereby relegating them to marginal status in a patriarchal culture.

Moreover, in many working-class and ethnic subcultures, women subordinate their own nutritional concerns to the tastes of their husbands and children; it is a form of gift-giving to serve a favored but unhealthy food, say, frankfurters and chips or barbecued ribs.

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, in his book, “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste,” further suggests that working-class people may be less likely than the more affluent to defer gratification--to eat salad rather than sirloin--because they have a more pessimistic appraisal of the future. People from poor backgrounds may prefer the foods that show you’re better off than your forebears: refined flour, white sugar (long a symbol of the “sweet life”), fats (as in “fat cat” and “fat of the land”) and meat, especially well-marbled Prime beef. But the most obvious class variable is price.

Healthy food is generally more expensive than the basic supermarket variety. But the reasons for this higher cost aren’t so obvious. Why, after all, should a free-range chicken that scrounges for bugs in a farmyard cost more than the standard one stuffed with expensive feed grains, hormones and antibiotics? Why should a locally grown organic tomato cost more than one nurtured in chemically treated soil, sprayed with pesticides, wrapped in protective foam and then trucked in from Mexico?

Part of the problem is that healthy supplies have not kept up with growing demand. Perhaps more important, our supposedly inexpensive standard food does not begin to reflect the full social, medical and ecological costs of its production: the damage to soil, ground water and farm workers; the damage to rural culture as family farmers and supportive small towns lose out to corporate growers with no local ties; and the drain on the federal budget from massive price supports. Without government irrigation subsidies, a pound of hamburger might cost $35. Granted, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is rethinking its policies that encourage use of fertilizers and pesticides. But in the meantime, American standard seems cheaper because all the “externalities” are left off the bill.

Supporting this price differential, demographic and psycho-graphic surveys show that affluent people do read food labels, worry about pesticides, buy exercise machines, count calories, order flounder instead of roast beef, smoke less, buy natural foods, ponder organic produce and like broccoli, shiitakes, chevre and, yes, even arugula. To be sure, not every upper-middle-class person is a healthy gourmet nut--but most of them seem at least partly aware of the trends and try to adapt.

Like their counterculture predecessors who ate granola not just to save the world but also because it was exotic and adventurous, today’s defectors from mainstream cuisine have complex, even contradictory goals. Consider the dual nature of healthy gourmet food: “lite” but rich.

On the healthy side, it fits the current lean and green formula. Small portions limit calories--the principle that has made frozen diet entrees such a growth industry for the food business. To keep the cardiologists happy, olive oil, yogurt and lime replace butter, cream and salt. Free-range chickens and grass-fed “designer” beef have less fat, antibiotics and hormones; they also may be raised under better conditions. The wild greens and baby vegetables are high in nutrients and fiber. Produce is seasonal, regional and, ideally, organic--grown without pesticides and chemical fertilizers. In short, the cuisine tries to be “lite,” not just on the body but also on the environment.

What the food lacks in bulk it makes up in aesthetic density: a concentrated clash of textures, flavors and styles. This is culinary jet-setting, with dishes leaping continents in a single bound. But this is not ethnic fare, with its steamy street fairs, finger foods and one-pot camaraderie. Nor is it truly populist--as in the quintessential sub-and-fries of the best American standard lunch counters. Rather, this is quieter and cooler, closer to James Beard than to Calvin Trillin, more distanced, self-conscious and tasteful; i.e., gourmet.

To an extent, this gourmet aura helps to reduce uncertainty about which foods are good for you. After all, one way consumers seek security is to pay more for something. While seeming to guarantee quality, the gourmet imprimatur also overcomes the healthy vs. tasty dichotomy, for the food that carries it usually does taste good. Yet, with its dizzying and disjointed array of historical, geographical and cultural references, the nouvelle menu probably exacerbates the current confusion. What better evidence than those thick, creamy desserts that food people scarf down after dutifully taking their greens and mineral water?

Given all of these conflicts, backlash seems inevitable; indeed, it’s already here--at those ubiquitous retro-diners serving up meat loaf and mashed potatoes, half-pound hamburgers and thick malts, often at exorbitant prices, to the same upscale customers who the week before were eating mahi-mahi and baby artichokes.

Aching for the “innocent” certainties of the 1950s, chic meat-loafers yearn to stop worrying about bacon grease, white sugar, maraschino cherries, artificial coloring, processed American cheese and other junk food cliches of the time when Ronald Reagan hosted “General Electric Theater” (1954-1962). In this culinary version of the Reaganesque suspension of disbelief, they dream of a time before Ralph Nader, George McGovern and the hippies messed everything up. Maybe you can go home again--or at least eat your way there.

Maybe, as Jane and Michael Stern imply in their book, “Square Meals,” canned mushroom soup did make “the perfect tuna casserole,” oven-fried corn-flake chicken was wholesome and Jell-O was the “chef’s magic powder.” If you were nine years old in 1956, life was simpler, the menu options fewer but more substantial. So don’t graze the tapas , just order the pot roast and potatoes. Indeed, why go out at all when you can stay home, microwave a Chef Boy-ar-dee and cocoon in front of Donna Reed reruns?

The diner craze does not bode well for those who fantasize about starting some intimate California cuisine-style bistro. A better bet for future restaurateurs may be to open a version of the American Standard cafe. But forget the Mom-and-Pop lunchroom kind, which was a lot of work and, in this day of food conglomerates, is probably doomed anyway. And forget the retro-diner too, which is a bit too cute and self-conscious to stay in vogue very long. Instead, would-be culinary entrepreneurs might consider borrowing the franchise fee and signing on with McDonald’s, the meat and potato people.

If you’re really serious about food reform, you needn’t lose heart, however, for revolutions are never made in restaurants anyway. There are big changes underway out there, literally at the grass roots--at all those newly converted organic farms dotting the landscape of Pennsylvania, Texas, even Iowa.

But that’s another story. . . .