10 ms·

My Great Grandmother’s Industrially Processed Food

84 points by heydenberk 11y ago

kazinator 11y ago
Mostly about mechanical processing. Of course, the circulating epigram "don't eat something your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food" refers to processing with additives: artificial flavors, colors, preservatives and conditioners of various kinds. Not to mention almost completely synthetic concoctions. It doesn't mean, for instance, "don't use soy sauce that has been processed the same way by the same company in Japan since the 1600's"; that is a horribly strawman interpretation of the idea.
- bmj 11y ago
  I've read a fair bit of Pollan's books, and I think you're spot on here. He's not against processing food (heck, he'd probably argue that is a defining trait of humanity), but rather, as you point out, synthetic or heavily-processed foods.
- nosuchthing 11y ago
  Food labeling seems to be getting excessively ambiguous, “spices,” “flavor”, “natural flavor,” and “artificial flavor” are all legal USDA terms. I'm not exactly sure what's legal or being used in food processing factories, but industrial solvents and other chemicals used to modify foods are not legally required to be listed as ingredients. Given the ambiguous black box of industrial food processing, it's only mildly disappointing to actively avoid processed foods like Girl Scout cookies and frozen foods. Historically, it's often taken decades to discover the toxicity of chemical innovations thought to be safe like DDT, BPA, pesticides, asbestos, lead, & C8/Teflon [2] . Acrylamide is now suspected as carcinogenic [3] and forms from heating starchy foods, notably cooked potatoes. [1] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131608 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10045156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10045156 [ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/11/dupont-chemistry-deception/ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/11/dupont-chemist... ] [3] http://www.who.int/foodsafety/areas_work/chemical-risks/acrylamide/en/ http://www.who.int/foodsafety/areas_work/chemical-risks/acry... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylamide#Toxicity_and_carcinogenicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylamide#Toxicity_and_carcin...
  - kazinator 11y ago
    Then there is all the alternative naming. Some people don't want to buy crap loaded with MSG, so it gets called by names like "hydrolized vegetable protein".
    - Swizec 11y ago
      My favourite so far has been "dehydrated cane juice".
      - pyre 11y ago
        I still see that in Canada, but in the US the FDA has gone after companies for improper labelling because sugar isn't juice.
        Swizec 11y ago
        I saw it in the US last week. I agree that sugar isn't juice, but technically if you take juice and dehydrate it, you get crystalized sugar.
        pyre 11y ago
        I get the "technically" but I believe that the FDA was going after it as a deceptive labelling practice.
        kazinator 11y ago
        And deceptive it arguably is. The clear issue is not that people are too dumb to realize that dehydrating cane juice results in sugar, but that when they scan the ingredients looking for "sugar", they may not always spot its disguised form.
      - semi-extrinsic 11y ago
        And the less egregious "skimmed milk powder". Sure, it also has some protein in it, but it's definitely used a lot in baby/children's food as a sweetener just so they can say "no added sugar".
- Spooky23 11y ago
  It's all about thinking about some idealistic past. If great-grandma wasn't wealthy, she ate lots of tinned beef smothered in potassium nitrate, all sorts of stuff packed in gelatin/salt, etc over the winter. And lots of beans. Most of my great-grandmothers were the daughters of Irish farmer. She probably shared a house with a cow and a dozen siblings, if they were lucky enough to own one. They had fresh milk with no anti-biotics, but also with no pasteurization or medical care for the cow. (Hopefully she didn't get sick.) No plastic bottles, but they drew water from a hand-dug well in a treeless landscape where cattle were the main farming activity. (ie. high probability of a contaminated water source) When you got to march, you didn't have to worry about pesticides in potatoes, but you did have to watch for worms.
  - lifeisstillgood 11y ago
    Totally absolutely bang on. What we have overcome vastly outweighs what we are killing ourselves with. At least until the zombie apocalypse
  - kazinator 11y ago
    Sure, and several hundred years ago, lead acetate was used as a sweetener. There are some exceptions. :)
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >It's all about thinking about some idealistic past. If great-grandma wasn't wealthy, she ate lots of tinned beef smothered in potassium nitrate, all sorts of stuff packed in gelatin/salt, etc over the winter. And lots of beans. Not sure in which parts of the world this holds true. In my part of the world, and we're talking a really pour country, everybody had their patch with vegetables etc, people caught fish, had animals (chicken etc) and all that. Most of the things they ate were fresh. For the non-fresh staff, they simply preserved it in salt (like they did with cod), or brine (e.g. for goat cheese, etc), or they dried it. No "tinned beef smothered in potassium nitrate" and no "gelatin". I'd say most of the places in Europe were like this, and some were still like that up until the 60s or 70s. And maybe people in NY, a huge city without ways to have your own produce and animals, ate all the "tinned beef" stuff, but I can't imagine many people doing that in Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, etc. >Most of my great-grandmothers were the daughters of Irish farmer. She probably shared a house with a cow and a dozen siblings, if they were lucky enough to own one. They had fresh milk with no anti-biotics, but also with no pasteurization or medical care for the cow. (Hopefully she didn't get sick.) No plastic bottles, but they drew water from a hand-dug well in a treeless landscape where cattle were the main farming activity. (ie. high probability of a contaminated water source) When you got to march, you didn't have to worry about pesticides in potatoes, but you did have to watch for worms. That's how people lived even up to the '70s in large parts of European countryside (Span, Italy, Greece, France, etc). From everybody I've talked to who lived like that in several countries, it wasn't particularly hard or bad. Farm work could be intensive but only for specific times of the year, most of the year they didn't have to do much if at all. And living with several siblings in a small house was just what everybody did, so they didn't feel they miss out on anything. Most of the time they were out and around in the village anyway.
- mikeash 11y ago
  Maybe the idea should be better stated if it's so easily misunderstood. I believe this is the origin of that phrase: http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/six-rules-for-eating-wisely/ http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/six-rules-for-eati... And, well, I don't really know what was meant by it. It decries Twinkies and Vitamin Water, but it also decries yogurt just because it's in a tube. Does shape matter for yogurt? He exalts fresh produce as the pinnacle of health, yet my great-great-great grandmother would have had extremely limited access to it for most of the year, and probably would not recognize most of the stuff I'm able to buy in the store. It's not a straw man when you legitimately don't understand what was intended.
  - rrego 11y ago
    epoxy-like tubes of Go-Gurt Well, the important part of that statement is probably epoxy-like which is probably meant to describe the consistency of the Go-Gurt. What makes go-gurt more epoxy-like than yogurt and what that adjective means elude me though
    - joe5150 11y ago
      It's probably not worth getting bogged down in the details when it comes to Pollan's polemics, but in my (admittedly limited) understanding the whole point of GoGurt is that it's less thick than ordinary yogurt, so you can suck it out of the tube...I'm having a hard time believing he's ever actually eaten a GoGurt.
    - grogenaut 11y ago
      Gogurt is actually really thin, more like thicker cream. It's not the good spackley (and tasty) stuff like greek yogurt or my favourite redwood farms goat yogurt (YUMM!!!).
  - joe5150 11y ago
    This is a great point. My great-great-great grandmother lived in Martin County, Kentucky, most likely ate mostly cornbread and string beans in fatback her whole life, and never saw quinoa or kale so long as she lived before dying in childbirth. I'm not exactly sold on this as a model lifestyle.
- ajmurmann 11y ago
  I sometimes wonder how many people in Europe are scared of additives because of the E-Number system that doesn't look natural at all and immediately makes you think that there are "chemicals" in your food. Who wants "E 300" in their food? Probably most random people you ask would say they don't want it without hesitation. Yet it's just Vitamin C.
  - m_mueller 11y ago
    IMO (I'm one of these Europeans) there's good reasons to avoid additives and there's bad ones. There seems to be a relationship between additives and the prevalence of obesity. That may not be causal, but at least when it comes to Artificial Flavours the mechanism of that happening seems pretty clear to me. Preservatives is something that seems to be much less needed in a typical European urban lifestyle (shopping for food at least 2 times a week). I like to differentiate additives in different groups: Citric Acid. Should be just fine, apart from citrus allergy. Other preservatives and nitrates. I'm weary about those, i.e. I try not to eat much. As an example, so far I haven't seen a good counterproof against the Hawaiian nitrate study [1]. If alternatives without such preservatives are available I will choose those (and instead take care to eat it quickly). Artificial Flavouring. I try to limit these since it tricks me into eating more. Vitamins. Don't care if they're in there, but I won't buy a product just because of added Vitamins - I'm eating enough fresh produce. Things that make the product look/sell better but give me no benefit, e.g. food colouring. I'm trying to avoid those, it's probably fine but I don't see why I should eat something my body hasn't been exposed to during human evolution that doesn't have any benefit. [1] http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/97/19/1458.full.pdf http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/97/19/1458.full.pdf
    - mimac 11y ago
      Citric acid is mainly produced by microbial fermentation so there is little worry even if you have a citrus allergy.
      - m_mueller 11y ago
        Interesting. I know someone with that allergy who avoids all citric acids, so I assumed this was a problem.
- InclinedPlane 11y ago
  "Synthetic concoctions". Oooo, that's almost as bad as "chemicals". There's no short-cut to figuring out whether food is healthful. Some processed food is quite healthful, some is not. Some fresh food is healthful, some is not. Some food your great-grandmother ate you should absolutely never put in your mouth, and idealizing her diet is not a smart thing to do.
- vacri 11y ago
  It's still a nonsense idea, and panders to the myth that people from a hundred years ago knew how to do things "right", and we've somehow forgotten. In actuality, food quality now is better than ever before, regardless of the fear mongering. People are healthier, live longer, and are larger of frame because of the better nutrition. In great-grandmother's time things like rickets were much more prevalent than today. Ye Olde Folks got things wrong left, right, and centre, and we get fewer things wrong today. Far better than the throwaway "What Would Granny Do?" is "Understand How Food Works". Not to mention staples of alternative cuisines - for example, my great-grandmother would not recognise tofu as a food, yet would recognise Spam.
- kragen 11y ago
  I think that when my great-grandmothers were alive (from the late 1800s up to the 1940s) food additives in use that are now banned included red lead, white lead, diethylene glycol, fishberries, opium, cocaine, strychnine, sawdust, vermilion, toxic copper salts (including cupric hydrogen arsenite!), and hydrogenated vegetable oil containing trans fats. To quote from a 1909 book about one of the pioneers: The latter part of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth century were marked by international strife, political upheaval, and suffering among the toilers. Cobbett, Burdett, and 'Orator' Hunt in 1817 were agitating for Parliamentary reform. Agricultural depression was extreme, and commercial probity was at its nadir. For threescore years the food of the people had been poor and dear. Contemptible and gross adulterations of all conceivable kinds were everywhere the rule. The dough of bread was mingled with alum, carbonate of lime, bone ash, potatoes, and beans. By eking out his sugar with gypsum chalk, and pipe-clay, the sweetmeat-maker derived unholy gains; and the pigments used contained lead, chromium, mercury, copper, sometimes even arsenic. The unwholesome hues of preserved green fruits and vegetables were due to boiling in copper vessels, or to the addition of cupreous salts. Cayenne pepper and curry powder were beautified by the scarlet oxide of lead. Vinegar was fortified with sulphuric acid. Canistered fish were tinted red by ferruginous earths. Now, some of these are still in use; gypsum "chalk" is harmless and an essential ingredient in many foods; alum is safe up to a certain level, and is an important ingredient in some kinds of pickling; sulfuric acid is perfectly harmless in sufficiently small quantities (it's GRAS, but I think still illegal in vinegar, and dangerously prone to pick up heavy metals); and as far as I know you can still tint your canned fish red with ochre, which is GRAS too. And bone ash won't hurt you, unless maybe it's infected with Mad Cow Disease. The others, though, are dangerous, and now they have very strict maximum permissible levels. The situation started to improve during my great-grandmothers' lifetimes. http://www.rsc.org/Education/EiC/issues/2005Mar/Thefightagainstfoodadulteration.asp http://www.rsc.org/Education/EiC/issues/2005Mar/Thefightagai... talks a bit about the history of processing foods with additives. Unfortunately, some of the less toxic preservatives are still in wide use, like nitrate and nitrite, even though these have been convincingly shown to cause stomach cancer.
trgn 11y ago
My mother-in-law, who grew up in a Midwestern city in the 40s-50s, recently mentioned it is much easier to get fresh produce today, than when she was young. For her, growing up, canned vegetables were the norm, fresh greens were a treat. For my own parents it is the opposite. Around the same time, they lived in an exurb, fairly rural environment, and ate with the seasons. They live a suburban area now, and eat more canned goods now than they used to. I was surprised to hear that eating processed foods was so common already 60-70 years ago.
- jakejake 11y ago
  Canning and jarring your own food was also extremely common - my great grandfather had a basement full of stuff they had grown and then preserved themselves. The idea of buying canned veggies wasn't unusual or unhealthy at all - except perhaps being viewed as lazy or a waste of money. Also, there weren't chemicals involved other than a lot of salt & vinegar.
  - Spooky23 11y ago
    My wife and I actually do this. It saves quite a bit of money (we can buy a bushel of green beans from a farm 45 minutes away for $15) and it's kind of fun to experiment with. We do the same with meat, but that is mostly frozen. The whole pseudo-science around "whole food" and "too much processing" is just that. Bunk. I spent my college and 20s years getting fatter because I ate a lot of fast food and restaurant meals (loaded with sugar and carbs), drank a lot of beer, and spent a lot of time sitting on my ass at work. The McDonald's cheeseburger isn't bad for you because it's "processed", it's bad for you because it's 350 calories, served with another 300 calories of fried potatoes and at least 20 oz of sugar water. The seemingly healthier burrito at Chipolte is pretty much the same... although you can contemplate the more humane treatment of the pig/cow/chicken.
    - eropple 11y ago
      > The seemingly healthier burrito at Chipolte is pretty much the same... It's a lot easier to buy something that's not disastrous for you at Chipotle, though. If I get a salad bowl there, I'm not hungry for 6-8 hours.
muxxa 11y ago
Also, Cassava, a food first domesticated 10,000 years ago and a current staple for over 'half a billion people', is toxic (Cyanide) unless processed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassava#Food_use_processing_and_toxicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassava#Food_use_processing_an...
- david-given 11y ago
  Potatoes are quite toxic --- they're related to deadly nightshade. The versions we eat are heavily engineered so that the tubers produce survivably small quantities of toxin. (Wild potatoes produce it as a defense mechanism.) However it's possible to stimulate otherwise safe potatoes into producing high quantities of the stuff via mishandling. People have died. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/horrific-tales-of-potatoes-that-caused-mass-sickness-and-even-death-3162870/?no-ist http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/horrific-tales-of... In the 1960s some potato breeders accidentally produced a poisonous breed of potato by crossing two perfectly harmless versions, and some people (mostly the potato breeders themselves!) were quite ill before anyone realised what was going on. http://boingboing.net/2013/03/25/the-case-of-the-poison-potato.html http://boingboing.net/2013/03/25/the-case-of-the-poison-pota... Also, seriously don't eat potato berries.
  - MrBuddyCasino 11y ago
    Same thing with Zucchini. Resently someone died here in Germany because a neighbour gave him a home grown one. Don't eat them if they taste bitter!
    - cmarschner 11y ago
      Good timing :-)
    - greggman 11y ago
      And yet peopl eat "bitter gourd" in China and "Goya" in Okinawa, both super bitter. Are those bad too and they just don't know any better?
w1ntermute 11y ago
Rachel Laudan (the author of the post) was interviewed on EconTalk last week: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/08/rachel_laudan_o.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/08/rachel_laudan_o.htm...
jallmann 11y ago
Pretty great article. It really blows my mind how different the food we eat today is, as compared to 500, 100 or even 50 years ago. For a long time, salt was precious and highly sought after. Sugar, at least the granulated form, has been "non-exotic" for only a few hundred years -- the article talks about sugar beet milling, and refers to the massive plantations of slaves used to harvest sugarcane. Even tomatoes are a New World crop -- imagine Italian food without tomato sauce. Heck, I remember when some fruits or vegetables were strictly seasonal -- now, we can get everything year-round, for basically the same price. Sure, there is a lot of chemically laden, industrially processed crap on supermarket shelves. But it is also easier to eat better now than ever before, not to mention the sheer variety of foods we have available.
- ajmurmann 11y ago
  I read in Fernand Braudele's "Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century Volume 1" that bread in many regions was only baked 2-3 times a year. Bread would grow mold or get that hard that people would chop it with an axe!
  - jallmann 11y ago
    Very interesting! Another book that touches on food history is Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, which talks a bit about the domestication of agricultural crops. So much of what we grow today bears little to no resemblance to their wild varieties. Eg, cabbage, broccoli, kale, and brussels sprouts all come from the same wild plant. Organic and GMO fuss aside, humans have been very, very good at manipulating our environment and food sources for a long time...
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
contingencies 11y ago
FWIW there's been a flurry of interesting torrents on the subject of food preservation and processing over the last couple of years.

84 points by heydenberk 11y ago

Mostly about mechanical processing. Of course, the circulating epigram "don't eat something your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food" refers to processing with additives: artificial flavors, colors, preservatives and conditioners of various kinds. Not to mention almost completely synthetic concoctions. It doesn't mean, for instance, "don't use soy sauce that has been processed the same way by the same company in Japan since the 1600's"; that is a horribly strawman interpretation of the idea.

bmj 11y ago
I've read a fair bit of Pollan's books, and I think you're spot on here. He's not against processing food (heck, he'd probably argue that is a defining trait of humanity), but rather, as you point out, synthetic or heavily-processed foods.
nosuchthing 11y ago
Food labeling seems to be getting excessively ambiguous, “spices,” “flavor”, “natural flavor,” and “artificial flavor” are all legal USDA terms. I'm not exactly sure what's legal or being used in food processing factories, but industrial solvents and other chemicals used to modify foods are not legally required to be listed as ingredients. Given the ambiguous black box of industrial food processing, it's only mildly disappointing to actively avoid processed foods like Girl Scout cookies and frozen foods. Historically, it's often taken decades to discover the toxicity of chemical innovations thought to be safe like DDT, BPA, pesticides, asbestos, lead, & C8/Teflon [2] . Acrylamide is now suspected as carcinogenic [3] and forms from heating starchy foods, notably cooked potatoes. [1] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131608 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10045156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10045156 [ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/11/dupont-chemistry-deception/ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/11/dupont-chemist... ] [3] http://www.who.int/foodsafety/areas_work/chemical-risks/acrylamide/en/ http://www.who.int/foodsafety/areas_work/chemical-risks/acry... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylamide#Toxicity_and_carcinogenicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylamide#Toxicity_and_carcin...
- kazinator 11y ago
  Then there is all the alternative naming. Some people don't want to buy crap loaded with MSG, so it gets called by names like "hydrolized vegetable protein".
  - Swizec 11y ago
    My favourite so far has been "dehydrated cane juice".
    - pyre 11y ago
      I still see that in Canada, but in the US the FDA has gone after companies for improper labelling because sugar isn't juice.
      - Swizec 11y ago
        I saw it in the US last week. I agree that sugar isn't juice, but technically if you take juice and dehydrate it, you get crystalized sugar.
        pyre 11y ago
        I get the "technically" but I believe that the FDA was going after it as a deceptive labelling practice.
        kazinator 11y ago
        And deceptive it arguably is. The clear issue is not that people are too dumb to realize that dehydrating cane juice results in sugar, but that when they scan the ingredients looking for "sugar", they may not always spot its disguised form.
    - semi-extrinsic 11y ago
      And the less egregious "skimmed milk powder". Sure, it also has some protein in it, but it's definitely used a lot in baby/children's food as a sweetener just so they can say "no added sugar".
Spooky23 11y ago
It's all about thinking about some idealistic past. If great-grandma wasn't wealthy, she ate lots of tinned beef smothered in potassium nitrate, all sorts of stuff packed in gelatin/salt, etc over the winter. And lots of beans. Most of my great-grandmothers were the daughters of Irish farmer. She probably shared a house with a cow and a dozen siblings, if they were lucky enough to own one. They had fresh milk with no anti-biotics, but also with no pasteurization or medical care for the cow. (Hopefully she didn't get sick.) No plastic bottles, but they drew water from a hand-dug well in a treeless landscape where cattle were the main farming activity. (ie. high probability of a contaminated water source) When you got to march, you didn't have to worry about pesticides in potatoes, but you did have to watch for worms.
- lifeisstillgood 11y ago
  Totally absolutely bang on. What we have overcome vastly outweighs what we are killing ourselves with. At least until the zombie apocalypse
- kazinator 11y ago
  Sure, and several hundred years ago, lead acetate was used as a sweetener. There are some exceptions. :)
- coldtea 11y ago
  >It's all about thinking about some idealistic past. If great-grandma wasn't wealthy, she ate lots of tinned beef smothered in potassium nitrate, all sorts of stuff packed in gelatin/salt, etc over the winter. And lots of beans. Not sure in which parts of the world this holds true. In my part of the world, and we're talking a really pour country, everybody had their patch with vegetables etc, people caught fish, had animals (chicken etc) and all that. Most of the things they ate were fresh. For the non-fresh staff, they simply preserved it in salt (like they did with cod), or brine (e.g. for goat cheese, etc), or they dried it. No "tinned beef smothered in potassium nitrate" and no "gelatin". I'd say most of the places in Europe were like this, and some were still like that up until the 60s or 70s. And maybe people in NY, a huge city without ways to have your own produce and animals, ate all the "tinned beef" stuff, but I can't imagine many people doing that in Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, etc. >Most of my great-grandmothers were the daughters of Irish farmer. She probably shared a house with a cow and a dozen siblings, if they were lucky enough to own one. They had fresh milk with no anti-biotics, but also with no pasteurization or medical care for the cow. (Hopefully she didn't get sick.) No plastic bottles, but they drew water from a hand-dug well in a treeless landscape where cattle were the main farming activity. (ie. high probability of a contaminated water source) When you got to march, you didn't have to worry about pesticides in potatoes, but you did have to watch for worms. That's how people lived even up to the '70s in large parts of European countryside (Span, Italy, Greece, France, etc). From everybody I've talked to who lived like that in several countries, it wasn't particularly hard or bad. Farm work could be intensive but only for specific times of the year, most of the year they didn't have to do much if at all. And living with several siblings in a small house was just what everybody did, so they didn't feel they miss out on anything. Most of the time they were out and around in the village anyway.
mikeash 11y ago
Maybe the idea should be better stated if it's so easily misunderstood. I believe this is the origin of that phrase: http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/six-rules-for-eating-wisely/ http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/six-rules-for-eati... And, well, I don't really know what was meant by it. It decries Twinkies and Vitamin Water, but it also decries yogurt just because it's in a tube. Does shape matter for yogurt? He exalts fresh produce as the pinnacle of health, yet my great-great-great grandmother would have had extremely limited access to it for most of the year, and probably would not recognize most of the stuff I'm able to buy in the store. It's not a straw man when you legitimately don't understand what was intended.
- rrego 11y ago
  epoxy-like tubes of Go-Gurt Well, the important part of that statement is probably epoxy-like which is probably meant to describe the consistency of the Go-Gurt. What makes go-gurt more epoxy-like than yogurt and what that adjective means elude me though
  - joe5150 11y ago
    It's probably not worth getting bogged down in the details when it comes to Pollan's polemics, but in my (admittedly limited) understanding the whole point of GoGurt is that it's less thick than ordinary yogurt, so you can suck it out of the tube...I'm having a hard time believing he's ever actually eaten a GoGurt.
  - grogenaut 11y ago
    Gogurt is actually really thin, more like thicker cream. It's not the good spackley (and tasty) stuff like greek yogurt or my favourite redwood farms goat yogurt (YUMM!!!).
- joe5150 11y ago
  This is a great point. My great-great-great grandmother lived in Martin County, Kentucky, most likely ate mostly cornbread and string beans in fatback her whole life, and never saw quinoa or kale so long as she lived before dying in childbirth. I'm not exactly sold on this as a model lifestyle.
ajmurmann 11y ago
I sometimes wonder how many people in Europe are scared of additives because of the E-Number system that doesn't look natural at all and immediately makes you think that there are "chemicals" in your food. Who wants "E 300" in their food? Probably most random people you ask would say they don't want it without hesitation. Yet it's just Vitamin C.
- m_mueller 11y ago
  IMO (I'm one of these Europeans) there's good reasons to avoid additives and there's bad ones. There seems to be a relationship between additives and the prevalence of obesity. That may not be causal, but at least when it comes to Artificial Flavours the mechanism of that happening seems pretty clear to me. Preservatives is something that seems to be much less needed in a typical European urban lifestyle (shopping for food at least 2 times a week). I like to differentiate additives in different groups: Citric Acid. Should be just fine, apart from citrus allergy. Other preservatives and nitrates. I'm weary about those, i.e. I try not to eat much. As an example, so far I haven't seen a good counterproof against the Hawaiian nitrate study [1]. If alternatives without such preservatives are available I will choose those (and instead take care to eat it quickly). Artificial Flavouring. I try to limit these since it tricks me into eating more. Vitamins. Don't care if they're in there, but I won't buy a product just because of added Vitamins - I'm eating enough fresh produce. Things that make the product look/sell better but give me no benefit, e.g. food colouring. I'm trying to avoid those, it's probably fine but I don't see why I should eat something my body hasn't been exposed to during human evolution that doesn't have any benefit. [1] http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/97/19/1458.full.pdf http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/97/19/1458.full.pdf
  - mimac 11y ago
    Citric acid is mainly produced by microbial fermentation so there is little worry even if you have a citrus allergy.
    - m_mueller 11y ago
      Interesting. I know someone with that allergy who avoids all citric acids, so I assumed this was a problem.
InclinedPlane 11y ago
"Synthetic concoctions". Oooo, that's almost as bad as "chemicals". There's no short-cut to figuring out whether food is healthful. Some processed food is quite healthful, some is not. Some fresh food is healthful, some is not. Some food your great-grandmother ate you should absolutely never put in your mouth, and idealizing her diet is not a smart thing to do.
vacri 11y ago
It's still a nonsense idea, and panders to the myth that people from a hundred years ago knew how to do things "right", and we've somehow forgotten. In actuality, food quality now is better than ever before, regardless of the fear mongering. People are healthier, live longer, and are larger of frame because of the better nutrition. In great-grandmother's time things like rickets were much more prevalent than today. Ye Olde Folks got things wrong left, right, and centre, and we get fewer things wrong today. Far better than the throwaway "What Would Granny Do?" is "Understand How Food Works". Not to mention staples of alternative cuisines - for example, my great-grandmother would not recognise tofu as a food, yet would recognise Spam.
kragen 11y ago
I think that when my great-grandmothers were alive (from the late 1800s up to the 1940s) food additives in use that are now banned included red lead, white lead, diethylene glycol, fishberries, opium, cocaine, strychnine, sawdust, vermilion, toxic copper salts (including cupric hydrogen arsenite!), and hydrogenated vegetable oil containing trans fats. To quote from a 1909 book about one of the pioneers: The latter part of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth century were marked by international strife, political upheaval, and suffering among the toilers. Cobbett, Burdett, and 'Orator' Hunt in 1817 were agitating for Parliamentary reform. Agricultural depression was extreme, and commercial probity was at its nadir. For threescore years the food of the people had been poor and dear. Contemptible and gross adulterations of all conceivable kinds were everywhere the rule. The dough of bread was mingled with alum, carbonate of lime, bone ash, potatoes, and beans. By eking out his sugar with gypsum chalk, and pipe-clay, the sweetmeat-maker derived unholy gains; and the pigments used contained lead, chromium, mercury, copper, sometimes even arsenic. The unwholesome hues of preserved green fruits and vegetables were due to boiling in copper vessels, or to the addition of cupreous salts. Cayenne pepper and curry powder were beautified by the scarlet oxide of lead. Vinegar was fortified with sulphuric acid. Canistered fish were tinted red by ferruginous earths. Now, some of these are still in use; gypsum "chalk" is harmless and an essential ingredient in many foods; alum is safe up to a certain level, and is an important ingredient in some kinds of pickling; sulfuric acid is perfectly harmless in sufficiently small quantities (it's GRAS, but I think still illegal in vinegar, and dangerously prone to pick up heavy metals); and as far as I know you can still tint your canned fish red with ochre, which is GRAS too. And bone ash won't hurt you, unless maybe it's infected with Mad Cow Disease. The others, though, are dangerous, and now they have very strict maximum permissible levels. The situation started to improve during my great-grandmothers' lifetimes. http://www.rsc.org/Education/EiC/issues/2005Mar/Thefightagainstfoodadulteration.asp http://www.rsc.org/Education/EiC/issues/2005Mar/Thefightagai... talks a bit about the history of processing foods with additives. Unfortunately, some of the less toxic preservatives are still in wide use, like nitrate and nitrite, even though these have been convincingly shown to cause stomach cancer.

trgn 11y ago

My mother-in-law, who grew up in a Midwestern city in the 40s-50s, recently mentioned it is much easier to get fresh produce today, than when she was young. For her, growing up, canned vegetables were the norm, fresh greens were a treat. For my own parents it is the opposite. Around the same time, they lived in an exurb, fairly rural environment, and ate with the seasons. They live a suburban area now, and eat more canned goods now than they used to. I was surprised to hear that eating processed foods was so common already 60-70 years ago.

jakejake 11y ago
Canning and jarring your own food was also extremely common - my great grandfather had a basement full of stuff they had grown and then preserved themselves. The idea of buying canned veggies wasn't unusual or unhealthy at all - except perhaps being viewed as lazy or a waste of money. Also, there weren't chemicals involved other than a lot of salt & vinegar.
- Spooky23 11y ago
  My wife and I actually do this. It saves quite a bit of money (we can buy a bushel of green beans from a farm 45 minutes away for $15) and it's kind of fun to experiment with. We do the same with meat, but that is mostly frozen. The whole pseudo-science around "whole food" and "too much processing" is just that. Bunk. I spent my college and 20s years getting fatter because I ate a lot of fast food and restaurant meals (loaded with sugar and carbs), drank a lot of beer, and spent a lot of time sitting on my ass at work. The McDonald's cheeseburger isn't bad for you because it's "processed", it's bad for you because it's 350 calories, served with another 300 calories of fried potatoes and at least 20 oz of sugar water. The seemingly healthier burrito at Chipolte is pretty much the same... although you can contemplate the more humane treatment of the pig/cow/chicken.
  - eropple 11y ago
    > The seemingly healthier burrito at Chipolte is pretty much the same... It's a lot easier to buy something that's not disastrous for you at Chipotle, though. If I get a salad bowl there, I'm not hungry for 6-8 hours.

muxxa 11y ago

Also, Cassava, a food first domesticated 10,000 years ago and a current staple for over 'half a billion people', is toxic (Cyanide) unless processed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassava#Food_use_processing_and_toxicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassava#Food_use_processing_an...

david-given 11y ago
Potatoes are quite toxic --- they're related to deadly nightshade. The versions we eat are heavily engineered so that the tubers produce survivably small quantities of toxin. (Wild potatoes produce it as a defense mechanism.) However it's possible to stimulate otherwise safe potatoes into producing high quantities of the stuff via mishandling. People have died. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/horrific-tales-of-potatoes-that-caused-mass-sickness-and-even-death-3162870/?no-ist http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/horrific-tales-of... In the 1960s some potato breeders accidentally produced a poisonous breed of potato by crossing two perfectly harmless versions, and some people (mostly the potato breeders themselves!) were quite ill before anyone realised what was going on. http://boingboing.net/2013/03/25/the-case-of-the-poison-potato.html http://boingboing.net/2013/03/25/the-case-of-the-poison-pota... Also, seriously don't eat potato berries.
- MrBuddyCasino 11y ago
  Same thing with Zucchini. Resently someone died here in Germany because a neighbour gave him a home grown one. Don't eat them if they taste bitter!
  - cmarschner 11y ago
    Good timing :-)
  - greggman 11y ago
    And yet peopl eat "bitter gourd" in China and "Goya" in Okinawa, both super bitter. Are those bad too and they just don't know any better?

w1ntermute 11y ago

Rachel Laudan (the author of the post) was interviewed on EconTalk last week: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/08/rachel_laudan_o.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/08/rachel_laudan_o.htm...

jallmann 11y ago

Pretty great article. It really blows my mind how different the food we eat today is, as compared to 500, 100 or even 50 years ago. For a long time, salt was precious and highly sought after. Sugar, at least the granulated form, has been "non-exotic" for only a few hundred years -- the article talks about sugar beet milling, and refers to the massive plantations of slaves used to harvest sugarcane. Even tomatoes are a New World crop -- imagine Italian food without tomato sauce. Heck, I remember when some fruits or vegetables were strictly seasonal -- now, we can get everything year-round, for basically the same price. Sure, there is a lot of chemically laden, industrially processed crap on supermarket shelves. But it is also easier to eat better now than ever before, not to mention the sheer variety of foods we have available.

ajmurmann 11y ago
I read in Fernand Braudele's "Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century Volume 1" that bread in many regions was only baked 2-3 times a year. Bread would grow mold or get that hard that people would chop it with an axe!
- jallmann 11y ago
  Very interesting! Another book that touches on food history is Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, which talks a bit about the domestication of agricultural crops. So much of what we grow today bears little to no resemblance to their wild varieties. Eg, cabbage, broccoli, kale, and brussels sprouts all come from the same wild plant. Organic and GMO fuss aside, humans have been very, very good at manipulating our environment and food sources for a long time...

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

contingencies 11y ago

FWIW there's been a flurry of interesting torrents on the subject of food preservation and processing over the last couple of years.