The Wednesday One Thing: Ranch Didn’t Make America Fat

It just made everything that made America fat taste better.

Editor’s note: This week’s investigation required reading the website of the Association for Dressings and Sauces. Yes, that’s a real organization. Yes, it has a mission statement. No, nobody was harmed. Mostly. I say mostly because it is another scam "non profit" that pays no taxes. https://dressings-sauces.org. Don't worry about taking care of our injured veterans, just send your donations to the non profit sauce industry! And don't forget to dip your ranch flavored Doritos in your ranch dressing while licking the stamp.

Somewhere in America right now, someone is dipping a slice of pizza in ranch. Someone else is dipping a chicken wing in it. A third person is dipping a picklein it, and nobody is stopping them.

Ranch is no longer a salad dressing. It’s a food group. There are ranch fountains at weddings, ranch kegs for parties and ranch-flavored everything from popcorn to vodka. Americans don’t just like ranch. We’ve built a personality around it. Which raises a fair question: the waistline of the nation grew right alongside the ranch bottle. Coincidence? Case closed?

Not quite.

Ranch is older than you think.
Around 1950, a plumber in Alaska named Steve Henson mixed buttermilk, mayonnaise and herbs so his work crew would eat their vegetables. Let that sink in: ranch was invented to get grown men to eat a carrot. Mission accomplished. Sort of. The carrots were never the point again.

By the late 1950s, Henson was running a dude ranch near Santa Barbara called Hidden Valley and mailing packets of the mix for 75 cents apiece. For its first twenty years, ranch was a quiet little regional secret. Then America found out about it:

• 1972: Henson sells Hidden Valley for $8 million to Clorox. Yes, the bleach company. The same people who make the stuff under your sink also make the stuff on your wings. Sleep tight.
• 1983: Ranch becomes shelf-stable. It no longer needs a refrigerator. It no longer needs anything. It will outlive us all.
• 1986: Cool Ranch Doritos. Ranch is no longer a dressing. It’s a flavor. A lifestyle. Possibly a religion.
• 1992: Ranch dethrones Italian as America’s #1 salad dressing and has never given the crown back. Italian has been in therapy ever since.

Who eats it? Oh, that’s us.
Americans now spend about $1.5 billion a year on ranch, more than we spend on ketchup. Ketchup, the condiment with its own bottle shape, lost to a buttermilk dip invented to trick plumbers into eating celery.

The rest of the planet mostly shrugs. In parts of Europe it’s sold as “American dressing,” which is either a compliment or a warning label. Cool Ranch Doritos over there are called “Cool American.” This summer, World Cup fans discovered it, and the TSA reported Europeans trying to sneak it home in their luggage. Our greatest cultural export, and it’s being confiscated at security next to the nail clippers.

How much do we eat?
The average American eats salad dressing 38 times a year. Fifteen of those times, it’s ranch. Nobody publishes how many gallons we go through, so we did the math. With about 342 million Americans, it works out to roughly a pint to a pint and a half of ranch per person, per year.

So not a teaspoon. Not 100 gallons. About two cups. And since plenty of Americans swear they never touch the stuff, somebody out there is eating theirs.

So did ranch make us fat?
Here’s the serious part. In the early 1960s, about 13% of American adults were obese. Today it’s about 41%. That’s real, and it’s not a joke.

Two cups of ranch a year adds up to about 2,100 calories, a full extra day of eating every year, in dip form. Do that from the first Cool Ranch Dorito to today and you’ve put away roughly 100,000 calories of ranch, or about seven weeks of meals. As a country, we go through somewhere around 100 Olympic swimming pools of the stuff every year.Michael Phelps could train in it. Nobody should.

And ranch is only the opening act. The average American now eats about 23% more food than in 1970, roughly 450 extra calories every single day. Nearly half of what we eat now comes from two places: flour and grains, plus fats and oils. Ranch’s main ingredient? Soybean oil. Its favorite companions? Pizza, wings and fries. You can tell a lot about someone by the company they keep.

So ranch isn’t the culprit. It’s the getaway driver.

Ranch didn’t make America fat. It just made everything that made America fat taste better.