My Great Grandmother’s Industrially Processed Food
rachellaudan.com
rachellaudan.com
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.
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....
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10045156 [ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/11/dupont-chemist... ]
[3] http://www.who.int/foodsafety/areas_work/chemical-risks/acry... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylamide#Toxicity_and_carcin...
When BPA was added to plastics it was known to be toxic. The issue was that it was thought to be inert and encapsulated in the material. The revelation came when we found that extreme heat (e.g. in your microwave) or extreme cold (e.g. in your freezer) causes it to leach out of the material and into (e.g.) you food.
Grreat.
You appear to be conflating the toxicity of C8/PFOA (previously used in the manufacturing of PTFE (Teflon®) with that of Teflon itself. The article you linked to is primarily about the health risks to those involved in the manufacturing of PTFE through exposure to PFOA.
However, regarding the toxicity of PTFE itself:
American Cancer Society: "[...] there are no known risks to humans from using Teflon-coated cookware. While PFOA is used in making Teflon, it is not present (or is present in extremely small amounts) in Teflon-coated products.' [1]
US Environmental Protection Agency: "[...] consumer products made with fluoropolymers and fluorinated telomers, including Teflon® and other trademark products, are not PFOA. [...] The information that EPA has available does not indicate that the routine use of consumer products poses a concern." [2]
[1] http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancercauses/othercarcinogens/a...
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.
What we have overcome vastly outweighs what we are killing ourselves with. At least until the zombie apocalypse
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.
SaltPeter has been around for a long time. Given that nitrates/nitrites help with botulism and the age of discovery & uses, I'd be surprised if it was a modern (post 1800's) thing, and wiki backs me up. For sure by the time Europeans were heavily in north america it would be in wide spread use. I mean they were using it for gunpowder too :)
When using them, you don't use much, but you use it. It also means you can use less regular salt.
Pre-mechanized agriculture, along with completely decentralized child-rearing, food preparation, hauling water from a well or river, weaving and sewing, house construction, carpentry, etc. just takes an absurdly enormous amount of manual work, and when the local strong-men demand their cut in return for protection, there’s little left over for the peasants.
Life expectancy, health, median material wealth, gender/social equality, &c. were across-the-board dramatically worse in agricultural societies than in hunter/gatherer societies.
The injunction is surely not to eat foods available now that your grandmother wouldn't recognise as food rather than to eat what your grandmother actually ate.
Taken that way it's not saying the past diets were ideal but that the completely new foods are generally less healthy than the progressively developed foods.
You seem to have made an logically erroneous negation of the assertion being addressed.
I believe this is the origin of that phrase:
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.
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
Quinoa, however, was much later, coming not from europe, but peru.
(edited for tone)
Whether I'm off the mark about kale or not is far beside the point. The fact is that my great-great-great grandmother and my great-great grandmother and on down to probably no more than a couple of generations ago...none of them would have had reliable or easy access to the kind of fresh food I do today, and they wouldn't have been familiar with the bigger portion of what I can find in practically any grocery store anywhere. It's not about whether or not there was kale growing in East Kentucky.
It's plenty likely that you and your own parents wouldn't have been familiar with the bigger portion of what your great-great-great-grandmother ate, either. And some of that was fresh food. East Kentucky had a lot more fresh plants in it back then than it does now.
In this case, yes? Gogurt is full of sugar. Of course the same can be true for yogurt in tubs as well. I feel the straw-manning of Pollan's writing is usually achieved by taking what is meant to be general guidance, pretending it's quite specific and stringent, and then poking logical holes in it.
Generally, the more packaging and marketing that went into something to get you to buy it, the more horseshit you'll find in it too. Generally.
Apparently there's some underlying meaning to "Don’t eat anything your great-great-great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food." that I'm not understanding. I'm not understanding it because my concept of what my great^3 grandmother would recognize as food, and the understanding of the person who wrote it, are extremely different. Yet the person who wrote it does not explain what he meant by it, and somehow this is my fault?
The past is not a region known for great nutrition. Taking food guidance from it doesn't seem very wise to me. I gather that this phrase is more along the lines of, "think of the idyllic, utopian, imaginary past that certain people believe is what it was actually like, and eat what they would have eaten," but that's not real helpful!
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
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.
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.
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.
The situation started to improve during my great-grandmothers' lifetimes.
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.
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.
Also, there weren't chemicals involved other than a lot of salt & vinegar.
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.
But will leave you feeling fuller for longer because it comes with more volume and with more complex carbs and stuff.
The idea is that you want to get closer to the source. For example, getting produce from the store that was shipped from Guam is possibly laden with chemicals used to preserve it until it reaches your grocery store. On the other hand, buying direct from the farm cuts out the need for that.
Also, food that has been cooked and recooked several times, then blended with food artificial preservatives is probably less healthy than (on average) than the food you make yourself from scratch.
Combine that with the fact that many industries explicitly target the "bliss point" when formulating their recipes... and you're probably better off with a home-cooked meal than a frozen microwave dinner.
I'd rather have food that tastes good but is still something I'm able to eat in moderation. I get that food makers have no incentive whatsoever to get me to eat in moderation, but that looks like a different thing from the "bliss point."
Some people might find this situation perfect because it helps to limit consumption. In reality, snack food companies see this as a defect in their product and attempt to engineer the limitation away.
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.
Too bad you can't get yogurt at McD's that doesn't have strawberry syrup laced through it and the fruit, or a salad dressing that isn't insane for calories (it's what happens when you add flour and sugar to ranch).
Yeah my problem with McD's is that the patties themselves aren't all that great and kinda salty.
A good grilled chicken lettuce wrap sandwich would be great.
We grew up on a farm, dirt-poor and did it out of necessity but it was all delicious food: pickles, relishes, canned fruit, jams, jellies, home-made tomoto sauce.
We also laid in bushels of produce into cold storage - potatoes, squash, apples and cabbages.
Do I need to mention what we froze?
Blanched peas, green and yellow beans, corn (cut off the cob) and home grown lamb, pigs, beef and chicken (both kinds).
I am far more well off then my parents were at the same age, but my kids are not nearly as well fed (nutritionally) as I was at the same ages.
Now that we are in prime harvesting season for a lot of this stuff, I might have to rethink what we're eating and preserve some simple, homemade foods.
Source: have been canning last few weeks, info straight from the 'Weck' bible.
Look, I'm not picking sides here, but let's not look at the past with rose colored glasses. When I tell my aunts that I'm canning, they look at me like I'm nuts. They lived much of their lives having to can on a farm, and they love the ease with which they can live their lives now, and the options they have.
The canning overall wasn't the primary source for the nutrition but it was a part of the overall strategy of prepare and store the food, outside of the "food industry".
And trust me, I remember the hard work clearly but I may be looking at the past wistfully wondering how to get my kids to eat more vegetables.
Also of note, in recent decades refrigerated trucks and global shipping lines have enabled out-of-season availability for a lot of produce that, fifty years ago, could not be had fresh for any price nine months of the year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassava#Food_use_processing_an...
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-pota...
Also, seriously don't eat potato berries.
So I would say, no, they're not bad. But don't go overboard.
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.