What does it mean to be nourished? The word nutrition, related to “nourish,” comes from nutrire (Latin), meaning to feed, support, nurture, and also nurse. “Food,” from foda (Old English), is related to “fodder” and “feed,” and means nourishment or fuel. The purpose of food is to nourish. There is controversy about what constitutes good nutrition, but most successful strategies recommend increasing high-fiber foods like produce, legumes, and whole grains, while simultaneously decreasing ultraprocessed items like chips, commercially baked items, and “fast” food.
The emergence of ultra processed items as a major component of the American diet derives from several developments. The supply, distribution, preparation, and eating patterns of food have changed markedly in the past century. The drive to decrease consumer costs while maximizing profits has markedly decreased the nutritional quality of the food supply. The majority of items eaten in the United States today — eaten in the home or out — are prepared, processed, or manufactured by individuals unknown to the purchaser. Food preparation has become largely an anonymous enterprise: the consumer does not know the cook, and the cook does not know the consumer. Before the 20th century, virtually everyone ate meals prepared at home by family members, and those meals were composed of fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and seeds, fish, eggs, meats, poultry, dairy (milk, cream, yogurt, butter, cheeses), and whole grains.
Partially hydrogenated fats, developed for the soap and candle industries, entered the commercial baking enterprise in 1911. High-fructose corn syrup erupted as a major ingredient in the early 1970s. Maltodextrin, modified food starch, vegetable shortening, and synthetic coloring agents simply did not exist in food, if at all.
The evolution of ultraprocessing to create the majority of items in the standard American diet is also attributable to changes in advertising and merchandising. Re-appropriating words that once described traditional foodstuffs to describe new inventions is a common theme. Consider the word “wheat.” Whereas “wheat” once meant the entire grain, including bran, endosperm, and germ, revised usage refers only to the white endosperm. The original product is now “whole-grain wheat.” When words are appropriated to describe ultraprocessed versions of foods, traditional staples require new descriptors. Terms like “organic,” “pesticide-free,” “wild,” “free-range,” “whole,” “old-fashioned,” “pastured,” and “hormone-free,” are necessary only because their historic names have evolved to mean something entirely, industrially, different.
Consider, too, non-dairy creamers, neither of whose first two ingredients, high fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, requires refrigeration. Nevertheless, supermarkets display these items in coolers, adjacent to the dairy products whose use they are meant to replace. The low cost of raw materials for “coffee whiteners,” lowered further by government subsidies, makes them exceedingly profitable, particularly in comparison to milk and cream. Where the system incentivizes profits over nutrition, the public’s health suffers the consequences.
How does one know whether an item is nourishing? “Eat the rainbow, “Eat close to the garden,” and “Eat nothing your ancestors would not have recognized as food” are various ways of saying the same thing: Eat real food.