A friend of mine says that ultraprocessed items don’t nourish, but rather they entertain. A few weeks ago I saw a commercial for Lay’s Potato Chips whose tag line was “Good food for the fun of it.” That sure sounds like entertainment to me.
Category Archives: Processed Edibles
The Commodity Compromise
In life, one always has to choose between quantity and quality. If your goal is to obtain an item of the highest possible quality, then it doesn’t matter how much you get. Take, for example, a sample of uranium. When it’s quality you’re after, it doesn’t matter whether you end up with a microgram or a kilogram. The issue of its purity is not negotiable, so the amount is secondary.
But when it’s quantity you seek, it doesn’t matter whether the end result is purity or perfidy, perfect or problematic. Continue reading
Fake Fruit Food
A few months ago I wrote about the “high margin-to-cost” breakfast cereal business. I have a few more thoughts, this time not specifically about the product itself, but about the pervasive use of fruity words in the naming of those breakfast cereals. Continue reading
Chocolate Mousse
What follows is a true story. It really happened, and you can draw your own conclusions.
Just over 13 years ago, on a snowy evening in January 2003, my daughter and I went out and brought home the sweetest, gentlest, 8-week-old Labrador Retriever puppy. She was a chocolate lab, and so we named her Mousse. Mousse played ball; Mousse cuddled with the children; Mousse helped me weed the garden; Mousse stole food from the kitchen table when she thought no one was looking; Mousse hung out with the chickens and enjoyed visiting with our friends and neighbors, both human and canine. Mousse became family, and all was well. Continue reading
The Actual Cost of a Burger
The announcements of the recent Academy Award nominations remind me to talk again about Food, Inc., a 2010 Academy-award nominee for Best Documentary, and winner of many other awards and nominations besides. Billed as a “civilized horror movie for the socially conscious, the nutritionally curious and the hungry” as well as “an unflattering look inside America’s corporate controlled food industry,” it minces no words. Just 94 minutes long, I urge you to make time to watch it. Continue reading
The Trans Fat Ban
This past summer, some 50 years after concerns were first raised about a possible link between trans fats and heart attacks, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ruled that partially hydrogenated oils, the primary dietary source of trans fats in processed food items, are no longer “generally recognized as safe” in human food. Processed food manufacturers will have three years to reformulate their products or request an exemption. This action is expected to prevent thousands of fatal heart attacks a year. Multiply that by 50 years. Continue reading
The Message
Today I’d like to speak about something that has been on my mind all week, and that something is “the message.”
As we all know, over the past 100 years the processed food industry has developed ever more sophisticated strategies for influencing the public to purchase an ever-growing proportion of processed edibles to replace real food. And the industry has been so successful in this endeavor, if you want to call it that, that ⅔ of Americans are now overweight, and 50 percent are expected to carry a diagnosis of diabetes by age 65. Continue reading
Are You Kidding Me?
Is it me or is it April first? Processed food-like items seem like they’re getting stranger and stranger. I have to assume that the recipe down below seemed like a more-or-less reasonable recipe to somebody at some point, but the attempts of the processed-edibles industry to keep people eating nonsense seem to be getting desperate. Continue reading
On #Commodity and #Terroir
Today we’re going to talk about commodities. What is a commodity? When goods and services are traded on the grand scale for other goods and services, they become “commodities.” One characteristic of a commodity is that its price is determined not by quality, but by demand. The greater the demand, the greater the market. That’s what determines whether an item is a commodity. Continue reading
Keep Your Enemies Closer
Yesterday morning I looked down and saw a tiny ant crawling along the inside of my left elbow. I felt an urge to flick it away, but not to squash it. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, I thought.
Researchers have discovered that the communities of microbes living in the guts of normal-weight individuals differ significantly from those in the guts of obese individuals. Researchers are also finding evidence to suggest that some common autoimmune diseases (like asthma) may result from decreased early exposure to bacteria, viruses, and other microorganisms that, in previous centuries, would have primed our young and immature immune systems, and protected us—later on—from these sometimes devastating autoimmune diseases.
The extensive use of broad-spectrum antibiotics in beings of all kinds, including both humans and livestock, is being linked to a myriad of consequences, including severe secondary infections like C. dificile colitis, against which we might ordinarily be protected by the community of healthy bacteria harbored in a normally functioning gut.
You might say that the bugs are our friends. Maybe not that, but they are certainly our neighbors.
When my children were young and felt ravaged by the latest cold virus, I explained that it was helping them to grow their “antibody library,” which would be protect them as they grew. We strengthen the bugs and they strengthen us. We occupy the same space. We are not at war. We inhabit their world, and they inhabit ours.
Why does an obese individual’s gut harbor a different community of bugs? I am going to guess that one aspect may have something to do with what those bugs are fed. Perhaps if we feed them real food, the ones that work with us will thrive. And maybe if we feed them ultraprocessed, food-like items, the ones that work against us thrive, and the good neighbors cannot survive. Other bugs have moved in to take their place.
Have you ever made a project with papier mache? The recipe for papier mache, consisting of just flour, water, and salt, results in a glue that dries rock hard. You can count on that. Why does paper mache last so long? Simply put, it doesn’t disintegrate because bacteria don’t eat it. I am not sure what white flour does to the neighborly bacteria in our guts, but I will never be convinced that it nourishes them. Being fed bread and water puts me in mind of prisoners in solitary confinement.
The bugs in our gut are related to our health in every way we can imagine, and a great many more than that, I suspect. That’s why I recommend that you keep your microbiological friends close and your enemies closer. They may not be enemies at all.