New Book Digs up the Dirt on Processed Foods

[marmar]

from Civil Eats:




New Book Digs up the Dirt on Processed Foods
By Andy Bellatti on February 26, 2013


You’ve heard of pink slime. You know trans fats are cardiovascular atrocities. You’re well aware that store-bought orange juice is essentially a scam. But no matter how great of a processed-food sleuth you are, chances are you’ve never set food inside a processing plant to see how many of these products are actually made.

Writer Melanie Warner, whose new expose-on-the-world-of-processed-foods book, Pandora’s Lunchbox, is out this week, spent the past year and a half doing exactly that. In her quest to explore the murky and convoluted world of soybean oil, milk protein concentrates (a key ingredient in processed cheese), and petroleum-based artificial dyes, she spoke to food scientists, uncovered disturbing regulatory loopholes in food law, and learned just how little we know about many of the food products on supermarket shelves.

After reading Pandora’s Lunchbox, I sent Melanie some burning questions via e-mail.

The term “processed food” is ubiquitous these days. The food industry has attempted to co-opt it by claiming canned beans, baby carrots, and frozen vegetables are “processed foods.” Can you help explain why a Pop-Tart is years away from a “processed food” like hummus?

You have to ask yourself, could I make a Pop-Tart or Hot Pocket at home, with all those same ingredients listed on the package? I don’t know anyone who could do that in their home kitchen. How would you even go about procuring distilled monoglycerides and BHT, for instance? These are highly processed food products loaded up with sugar and sodium, subjected to abusive processing conditions, and assembled with a litany of additives, many of which nobody ever consumed prior to a hundred years ago.

Yet it is possible to make your own black beans at home by soaking and then cooking them. You could even attempt a rudimentary canning operation to preserve them. You can also make hummus by grinding chickpeas with a few other ingredients like lemon juice. The same goes for frozen vegetables and even baby carrots, though homemade baby carrots wouldn’t look as pretty as the ones you buy at the story. The “processing” these foods go through is minimal and not disfiguring. The end result still looks like a food that once grew on a farm. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://civileats.com/2013/02/26/new-book-reveals-everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-processed-foods/#sthash.0oacZy9b.dpuf

[malaise]

1. We don't eat processed food

Thankfully. Frightening!!

[niyad]

2. I eat almost nothing from the processed and convenience sections and have not for decades.

it is almost frightening what passes for "food" these days.

I still know how to can and preserve and smoke, learned when I was very young.

[nilram]

3. store-bought orange juice is essentially a scam? No, didn't know that.

on edit:

oh, there's a link in the article. yuk. http://consumerist.com/2011/07/29/oj-flavor-packs/

I tend to buy whole fruit more than juices anyway.

[Silent3]

4. When a thing is proven harmful I care, or if there's a *good* reason...

...for suspicion, I might care.

But I'm not for knee-jerk "Natural, good! Artificial, BAD!" oversimplification of food issues. I'm not for treating the word "chemical" as if it were a dirty word, conveniently forgetting that everything we eat is made out of chemicals, as if there aren't very dangerous natural chemicals and perfectly safe artificial chemicals.

I don't think that just because a process is more complex and industrial than you can perform in your kitchen at home it's automatically an unhealthy process.

While there are good reasons not to fully trust the FDA and other government agencies responsible for protecting our food, I don't believe the correct way to compensate for that lack of full trust is to assume that everything "unnatural" is bad, and that anyone or anything that says otherwise is a sham and a cover-up and a conspiracy to poison you.