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the issue with all of these foods is the amount of chemistry required to get them working. I like Michael Pollan's philosophy of "not eating food your grandmot

the issue with all of these foods is the amount of chemistry required to get them working. I like Michael Pollan's philosophy of "not eating food your grandmother wouldnt recognise". My outlook is at odds with the majority of folks I know which eat heavily processed food. I just cant see positive health outcomes with diets where your main protein source is stuff like this...VS being nuts, tofu, legumes (and milk, yoghurt, cheese, eggs if you eat them).

akiselev 4y ago
Many grandmothers who lived during the great depression ate ultraprocessed stuff like spam and vienna sausages that I barely recognize as food and most of the fruits and vegetables I have available are barely recognizable to them. I don’t think we should be using such simplistic yardsticks to measure our diets.
- an_aparallel 4y ago
  That's a great point - i'll give you that. But their grandmothers probably baulked at that too? :) Taking this further, cooking IS processing food, nuts (ie. cashews) require curing before eating else being poisonous. Where [i]should[/i] one stop with this idea?
  - akiselev 4y ago
    > But their grandmothers probably baulked at that too? I don’t think it’s a very big leap from mortadella (circa 14th century) or bologna sausage (some centuries later) to vienna sausages. Abundant fresh meat and vegetables are a very recent development thanks to refrigerated transportation. The poor and middle class only ate fresh food during harvest time, most of the rest was either dry or processed.
  - basch 4y ago
    processing isnt a binary but a spectrum. The harnessing of fire made humans the universal predator, that could denature poison and kill bacteria. Salt and Acid as preservatives fall into similar categories. This is processing that has been around as long as or longer than modern humans. Human's wouldn't be humans without fire, salt, and acid. Conversely, pea protein isolate, spun into meat with 30 other isolated substances isnt really "food" in any historical or traditional sense. Somewhere in-between lies things like fermentation. It's up to you to draw a line somewhere, or forget about lines and eat anything.
- willnonya 4y ago
  That is a great comment. Not because it raises a valid point but because it is a great example of stringing irrelevant pieces together and pretending there is a valid point. Starts off by digging back 90 years to pick an example that just barely applies and treating it as if it were a normal thing. Then disparages a fairly rare option while condescending about the recongizeability of foods available now. All of this while deftly ignoring the original point of the comment it's responding to to dispute its validity without addressing it. The variability of food over the last century has no bearing on whether you should eat foods you recognize or the adviseability of eating the type of 'food' described in the article.
  - akiselev 4y ago
    Thank you! You’re the first person to call me an elitist from an ivory tower. Spam was introduced in 1937 and three years later 70% of urban Americans were eating it. Around 100 million pounds of Spam were shipped to troops during World War II. That’s according to Hormel Foods, the manufacturer. If that’s what you consider “fairly rare” we’re speaking different languages.
aaron695 4y ago

akiselev 4y ago

Many grandmothers who lived during the great depression ate ultraprocessed stuff like spam and vienna sausages that I barely recognize as food and most of the fruits and vegetables I have available are barely recognizable to them. I don’t think we should be using such simplistic yardsticks to measure our diets.

an_aparallel 4y ago
That's a great point - i'll give you that. But their grandmothers probably baulked at that too? :) Taking this further, cooking IS processing food, nuts (ie. cashews) require curing before eating else being poisonous. Where [i]should[/i] one stop with this idea?
- akiselev 4y ago
  > But their grandmothers probably baulked at that too? I don’t think it’s a very big leap from mortadella (circa 14th century) or bologna sausage (some centuries later) to vienna sausages. Abundant fresh meat and vegetables are a very recent development thanks to refrigerated transportation. The poor and middle class only ate fresh food during harvest time, most of the rest was either dry or processed.
- basch 4y ago
  processing isnt a binary but a spectrum. The harnessing of fire made humans the universal predator, that could denature poison and kill bacteria. Salt and Acid as preservatives fall into similar categories. This is processing that has been around as long as or longer than modern humans. Human's wouldn't be humans without fire, salt, and acid. Conversely, pea protein isolate, spun into meat with 30 other isolated substances isnt really "food" in any historical or traditional sense. Somewhere in-between lies things like fermentation. It's up to you to draw a line somewhere, or forget about lines and eat anything.
willnonya 4y ago
That is a great comment. Not because it raises a valid point but because it is a great example of stringing irrelevant pieces together and pretending there is a valid point. Starts off by digging back 90 years to pick an example that just barely applies and treating it as if it were a normal thing. Then disparages a fairly rare option while condescending about the recongizeability of foods available now. All of this while deftly ignoring the original point of the comment it's responding to to dispute its validity without addressing it. The variability of food over the last century has no bearing on whether you should eat foods you recognize or the adviseability of eating the type of 'food' described in the article.
- akiselev 4y ago
  Thank you! You’re the first person to call me an elitist from an ivory tower. Spam was introduced in 1937 and three years later 70% of urban Americans were eating it. Around 100 million pounds of Spam were shipped to troops during World War II. That’s according to Hormel Foods, the manufacturer. If that’s what you consider “fairly rare” we’re speaking different languages.

aaron695 4y ago