4 ms·
My personal definition comes from how understandable the ingredients are. In the bread example, it’s just flour, salt, water, yeast, and sugar (in some breads).
by rcme 4y ago
My personal definition comes from how understandable the ingredients are. In the bread example, it’s just flour, salt, water, yeast, and sugar (in some breads). The bread I have at home contains soy lecithin. I know that’s an emulsifier but I don’t understand how it’s made. A quick Google search says it’s made with solvents like hexane, so I would consider that highly processed. Overall, I would consider my bread moderately processed compared to a loaf of sourdough. Now compare Velveeta to real cheese. There are many things in Velveeta I don’t understand that likely have complicated derivations.
- Clamchop 4y agoThis sort of reasoning would fall apart if ingredient labels at a molecular level were put on "whole" foods, most of which (including bread) will have hundreds to thousands of chemicals that you won't recognize. Almost invariably, some of those will be associated with cancer. Being able to design food using mostly pure ingredients should be a way of assuring safety but it triggers a labeling requirement that might lead consumers to believe that the chemical is novel and was not previously found in food. Another way of describing soy lethicin (if the source is soybeans) would be "a fraction of soybean oil".