7 ms·

Inside the food industry

• houseofshards 12y ago
  Relevant here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food,_Inc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food,_Inc. (the last time I checked this was available on Netflix)
• dzhiurgis 12y ago
  This kinda again confirms you should stick to fruit and vegetable based diet. Although sensationalist title would make you want to think different.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • brandon73 12y ago
    Come again? Could you expand on this? I'm all for eating fresh fruit, vegetables, roots, etc, but I don't see how this article supports only a plants based diet? Really I think what it's saying is avoid mass produced food, no? For example, the locally sourced fresh beef I buy from my local farmer?
    • dzhiurgis 12y ago
      It's saying to avoid processed foods. Most of the processed foods are animal related. Even the bread has milk inside. Eliminate the animals and what you are left is plants. Simple.
      • brandon73 12y ago
        Correct. So instead of saying veganism, we should instead be saying real/fresh food... at least, based on this article. Not saying you can't be vegan, just that this article isn't saying that.
      • WillPostForFood 12y ago
        Milk is not a typical ingredient in bread. In this analysis of 2000 bread ingredient lists, it doesn't show up in the top 20. http://blog.fooducate.com/2010/11/04/the-top-20-ingredients-used-in-bread-miniseries-part-3/ http://blog.fooducate.com/2010/11/04/the-top-20-ingredients-... As a home bread maker, I've never used milk. Occasionally eggs, or butter, but mostly just flour, water, yeast, and salt.
        • dzhiurgis 12y ago
          Bread itself is a processed grain.
      • refurb 12y ago
        I don't get the concerns around processed food. If I buy a bunch of apples and make apply jam (adding "chemicals") it's apparently bad now? Or if I process cucumbers into pickles? "Processed" doesn't really tell you anything.
      • Oletros 12y ago
        > Most of the processed foods are animal related. Source for this?
        • dzhiurgis 12y ago
          I'm talking in the context of this article.
          • Oletros 12y ago
            I still don't see that argument in the article.
• tzs 12y ago
  > NatureSeal is classed as a processing aid, not an ingredient, so there’s no need to declare it on the label, no obligation to tell consumers that their “fresh” fruit salad is weeks old. Here's how the FDA defines processing aids [1]: (ii) Processing aids, which are as follows: (a) Substances that are added to a food during the processing of such food but are removed in some manner from the food before it is packaged in its finished form. (b) Substances that are added to a food during processing, are converted into constituents normally present in the food, and do not significantly increase the amount of the constitutents naturally found in the food. (c) Substances that are added to a food for their technical or functional effect in the processing but are present in the finished food at insignificant levels and do not have any technical or functional effect in that food. I have not seen anything that says that it means to have a "technical or functional effect". Speaking of food labeling, I just last night noticed something odd at Domino's. Here is what they list on their site as the ingredients in their garlic dipping sauce: Soybean Oil, Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Salt, Natural Flavor, Soy Lecithin, Artificial Flavor, Beta Carotene (Color). I can't help but notice that their "garlic" dipping sauce has no listed ingredient that has any obvious connection to garlic. [1] http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFRSearch.cfm?fr=101.100 http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFRS...
  • rogerbinns 12y ago
    The author Joanna Blythman is a British journalist, with the article published in a British newspaper. I think you'll find that a US agency has little to do with what was discussed, and that European regulations are what applies. They are also the source of 'E' numbers mentioned. The FDA has no problem with rBST for cows, while it is banned in Europe and several other countries. The way the EU and the US treat eggs is also different, although it is harder to tell who is right: http://www.forbes.com/sites/nadiaarumugam/2012/10/25/why-american-eggs-would-be-illegal-in-a-british-supermarket-and-vice-versa/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/nadiaarumugam/2012/10/25/why-ame...
    • tzs 12y ago
• CuriouslyC 12y ago
  People who are hung up on ingredients being "natural" drive me nuts. I'm 100% for rigorous product testing to ensure safety, but if an ingredient is safe and allows the creation of higher quality food, it shouldn't matter it is natural or not. Cars, the internet and modern medicine aren't "natural" either... There are literally tons of people who will ridicule anti-vaccination nuts, then turn around and insist all food be "natural", completely oblivious to the hypocrisy.
  • brandon73 12y ago
    None of those are put into your body multiple times every day, a body which evolved in tandem with the natural world over eons. I'm not strictly a naturalist, though, but it makes sense to err on that side of caution, because evolutionary biology.
    • venomsnake 12y ago
      It didn't evolve in tandem, it adapted and began to modify "natural world" to suit it.
    • Oletros 12y ago
      Almost all of the vegetables and cereals we eat appeared after great modifications to the wild species less than 10 thousand years. How the body evolved to that? Were they natural?
  • rayiner 12y ago
    The desire for things that are "natural" arises from the wariness of ingesting something that hasn't been tested by time and human history. There's a long history of commercially-common chemicals that turned out to have tremendously bad impacts on human health (e.g. trans-fats, lead in gasoline). Vaccines raise the same concern, of course, but have dramatic and immediately obvious countervailing benefits that justify their use. In comparison, the only benefit from chemical food additives is usually saving a few bucks.
    • bsder 12y ago
• rickdale 12y ago
  I live out in the country. My favorite part of the summer is that most of the food I consume is coming from farms/homes that are within 2 miles of where I live. Vegetables from one guy, chicken, eggs, meat from another. It's hard to keep up with it in the winter, but it really opened my eyes as to what I am eating. I started out just thinking, "I wonder if I could eat without going to the grocery store." It was surprisingly easier than I thought and then I realized all the health stuff after. Its nice knowing where my food comes from.
• schackbrian 12y ago
  I would be surprised if how easy ingredients are to pronounce is correlated with their health. Since half of all food is wasted, preservatives could even be good for the environment. Ingredients of an All-Natural Banana: https://jameskennedymonash.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/ingredients-of-an-all-natural-banana/ https://jameskennedymonash.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/ingredie...
• nazgulnarsil 12y ago
  Starting a food startup revealed a lot of this stuff to me. There's something called "clean labeling" which refers to the ability to put various synthetic shelf life or flavor enhancing compounds in your foods and label it as something innocuous sounding due to skirting the labeling laws. The companies that generate these compounds advertise them as such. This intersects with the fact that the FDA operates essentially on a complaint basis. That is, if they don't receive any complaints about something it is very unlikely to ever be looked in to. And how would you know to complain if the package just says "modified starch"? So it's hard to credibly differentiate yourself along this dimension since in some cases there is literally no way that the customer could tell that one company is using less crap in their food.
  • xkcd-sucks 12y ago
    You could ask how the starch is "modified," for starters...
• xkcd-sucks 12y ago
  So, this article highlights important issues with convenience foods, with a minimum of fearmongering relative to the standard of this topic. The article claims that rosemary extract is Bad because it substitutes for BHA/BHT, a preservative. At this point I stopped reading due to an overwhelming urge to bang my head into the table. Preservation is in fact a major reason for seasoning-- in a preserved meat, no less! (And BHA/BHT are antioxidants-- which makes them Good...) Similarly, it's not surprising that yeast extract (nutritional yeast Good) contains the Bad MSG. Glutamate is a fundamental building block of life. If you've ever tasted yeast extract, you will immediately notice that it's very salty. The only reason to eat it is as a flavor enhancer, because as a major constituent it's too salty-- except for various Commonwealth countries that like to put it on toast. Etc... Shit, I bet the egg yolks in my cake batter are Bad because they substitute for cholesterol, an emulsifier and flavor enhancer which is linked to diseases (it also tastes nasty on its own) Crappy food optimized for convenience, scale and profit is a huge problem. I hate-- the actual, painful, comsuming hate-- convenience foods and I double hate franchise restaurants etc. because they reduce the amount of "real," freshly prepared, flavorful food immediately available to me. But that doesn't obviate the need for critical thinking. Finally, as a practicing biochemist and excellent cooker/eater I'm Offended by the insinuation that one cannot be equally comfortable in a kitchen or in a lab. Derek Lowe's several article[0]s should be boilerplate at the end of any chemicals vs food piece. [0] http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/04/30/is_that_food_or_not.php http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/04/30/is_that_food... Edit: after skimming the remainder of the article, it becomes clear that its author has never cooked anything
  • legulere 12y ago
    > Similarly, it's not surprising that yeast extract (nutritional yeast Good) contains the Bad MSG. This is not so much an issue of bad or good chemicals, it's an issue of honesty. There are tons of products out there with "no added glutamate" that have yeast extract on their ingredient list. I don't even mind when food producers hide that they add glutamate by using yeast extract as long as they declare it as a flavor enhancer.
    • tptacek 12y ago
• holri 12y ago
  The problem lies deeper. The main problem is the alienation between the producer and consumer. Industrialization does not fit well with food production. Because price optimization through division of fixed costs leads to standardized high volume products. But it is diversity that is healthy, tastes good and is natural. The Community-supported agriculture (CSA) model or Food cooperatives (foodcoop) directly addresses those fundamental problems.
• Animats 12y ago
  There's no big secret about this. See "http://www.foodprocessing.com" http://www.foodprocessing.com". Typical article: "Understanding Polydextrose and How It Works". Food stopped being "natural" when cooking was invented. Then there's the darling of the startup community, "Soylent". Not only is it incredibly overpriced ($85/week) for a soy product, they require pre-ordering months in advance.
• jasonisalive 12y ago
  People should focus instead on something that has worsened, not improved, with scientific intervention and technological development - the enslavement, brutalisation, and mass slaughter of billions of land animals (not to mention the treatment of sea animals and ecosystems) due to the continued maladjusted cultural preference for animal products. How can people winge and moan about their wounded sense of aesthetic purity (the same people driving this trend by picking the brand 10 cents cheaper on the supermarket shelves) when countless numbers of living, sentient creatures are brought into being by us, for the sole purpose of living miserable, dreary lives, punctuated by sickness and episodes of violence, capped off by a final often-horrific experience of slaughter, simply so that we can treat them like small factories, extracting products from them, then eating their body parts or furnishing our cars and bodies with their skin? Why not be simply thankful that you have freedom from pain, sickness, confinement and slaughter. To complain of the food we eat, as if we are the victims of our own preferences for convenience and low cost, while billions of animals are subjected to treatment tantamount of instituionalised torture, is the height of entitlement.
  • ars 12y ago
    If you are trying to make a point about animal welfare you might want to not say stupid things like "enslavement".
  • kefka 12y ago
    So, plants are less than animals, which are less than humans? Do I understand that correctly? All life is sacred. The human over there, or the dog there, or the orchid over that shouldn't matter: they all have an innate right to life. We humans have this sense that we are the master of who lives and dies. Somehow, dogs and cats are pets, yet pigs and cows and chickens are food. And plants and trees can be strip mined for their resources. But this human master is based solely on might-makes-right principle. In the end, for us to live, others must die. That is the cycle we live in. One can renounce eating meat. Yet, what we need is a conscience and ethic of food. Or better said: make your life worthy of the beings who died for you.
  • Oletros 12y ago
    > due to the continued maladjusted cultural preference for animal products. Why is maladjusted?
• Puts 12y ago
  I can see a lot of positive comments here, but say that even IF these additives don't impose any risks to the consumers, apparently this is still something the consumers don't want. For the industry to then whitelabel these ingredients is just like Lenovo secretly puts adware on their laptops with the arguments that they are helping their customers find new products. I don't want you to help me in secret. I want you to be transparent so I can make my own decisions!
• fauigerzigerk 12y ago
  OK, so for me, the only takeaway from this article is that we need radically more transparency and we will not get it from food manufacturers voluntarily. I'm not sure it will make us any healthier, but at least it may help journalists do something a little more helpful than dumping long lists of suspicious sounding names of chemicals on us. Ideally, more transparency would enable scientists to identify the few really bad stuffs among artificial AND natural ingredients more quickly. I doubt it will have any big effect on public health though, as it takes very long term studies to answer even the most basic questions about the main components of our food.
• buttproblem 12y ago
  The author of this article and the food industry seem to know what the people want: > Ingredients that give the impression that they originated in a grandmother’s kitchen and have not been processed too harshly are of great appeal to consumers. The common convenience food route minimize price and maximize flavour but ignores nutrition. They are so optimized flavor-wise that they are literally addicting. On the other hand, "natural" foods maximize "healthy sounding" ingredients. What if advancements in the food industry were used in healthy food too? For example, what if we could create a spinach salad that is as addictive as dorritos? As an example from the article, the scientists were able to transform potato protein into something that tastes like "butter, cream, and eggs." There's no mention of the nutritional value of this stuff but imagine if it was a powder with no nutritional value (like Splenda) which you could sprinkle over your previously bland and healthy food to make it taste buttery? Industrial processes are slowly making their way into the mainstream with books like Modernist Cuisine. As an example from the book, the common "grandmother" way to thicken gravies and other sauces is to use flour or corn starch. However, these thickeners require (1) a large amount of starch, and (2) have a large particle size. The result is that the flavour in the food decreases (perhaps now you need to add more salt), and the mouthfeel becomes gritty. Scary commercial chemicals such as N-Zorbit (Tapioca Maltodextrin) don't have this problem.