If we can’t pronounce it, do we want to eat it?
It’s interesting how big food conglomerates are removing artificial and
unnatural ingredients from their products.
Kraft has announced it’s removing artificial preservatives from its Singles cheese. Last week, Subway revealed it was dropping azodicarbonamide from its bread recipes after a food blogger/crusader pointed out the same ingredient is used in making yoga mats. Yoga mats? Somehow, it’s hard to imagine exercising on a yoga mat then making a sandwich with it.
What’s interesting is azodicarbonamide is approved as a food additive, or that other artificial ingredients going into our food can be used in inedible products as well. Granted, cold calamari has the consistency of a bicycle inner tube but at least they don’t share ingredients.
For years, people have tried to find alternatives to artificial and chemically produced food and sought out natural foods, the kinds of food our grandparents ate — and often grew — before the age of industrialized agriculture.
The huge conglomerates did a great job in their early days of convincing folks that artificial preservatives that kept food from going bad for months or years (or decades, according to the Twinkies urban legend) was good for us. Thanks to the wonders of chemistry, companies could sell us cheese that didn‘t mold, flexible bread, brightly colored candy and meat more pumped up than A-Rod and Jose Canseco combined.
Things were great until some of those wondrous ingredients turned out to be carcinogenic or contributed to assorted health ailments. Some of them just didn’t seem to have a lot of benefit for the consumer other than removing weight from the wallet.
I’ve never particularly been a health food advocate, but common sense should tell us that we really shouldn’t consume stuff if we need a chemistry class to know what it is. I realize chemicals occur in nature, too, and some can be beneficial as additives, but overall should we really be eating and drinking products that come from a lab and not nature?
There was a time when most people had gardens and grew their own fruits and vegetables, usually with little or no chemical products. If they didn’t have gardens, or needed more fruits and vegetables, they could get locally or regionally grown items at a local market. They could get locally produced meats, cheese and milk produced without growth hormones or artificial additives. And even if the preparation techniques may have been questionable by today’s standards (specifically lots of frying, especially here in the South) overall people could get better nutrition without added chemicals.
The pendulum is swinging back to consuming locally produced foods and growing your own vegetables and fruits, but for most of the country we’re still dependent on big conglomerates and industrialized agriculture instead of family-owned farms and ranches for our food. Because of that, we need to be more aware of what they’re putting into the food chain, and, thus, into us.
If we want to keep artificial ingredients and additives out of our food, then we need to let these big companies and industrial farming consortiums know. The best way is to buy local, avoid those items with questionable ingredients or additives you don’t want, and to encourage others to do the same. Sure, it’s small drops in a big bucket, but we’ve seen how they can add up before to make changes, and it can happen again.
Kraft has announced it’s removing artificial preservatives from its Singles cheese. Last week, Subway revealed it was dropping azodicarbonamide from its bread recipes after a food blogger/crusader pointed out the same ingredient is used in making yoga mats. Yoga mats? Somehow, it’s hard to imagine exercising on a yoga mat then making a sandwich with it.
What’s interesting is azodicarbonamide is approved as a food additive, or that other artificial ingredients going into our food can be used in inedible products as well. Granted, cold calamari has the consistency of a bicycle inner tube but at least they don’t share ingredients.
For years, people have tried to find alternatives to artificial and chemically produced food and sought out natural foods, the kinds of food our grandparents ate — and often grew — before the age of industrialized agriculture.
The huge conglomerates did a great job in their early days of convincing folks that artificial preservatives that kept food from going bad for months or years (or decades, according to the Twinkies urban legend) was good for us. Thanks to the wonders of chemistry, companies could sell us cheese that didn‘t mold, flexible bread, brightly colored candy and meat more pumped up than A-Rod and Jose Canseco combined.
Things were great until some of those wondrous ingredients turned out to be carcinogenic or contributed to assorted health ailments. Some of them just didn’t seem to have a lot of benefit for the consumer other than removing weight from the wallet.
I’ve never particularly been a health food advocate, but common sense should tell us that we really shouldn’t consume stuff if we need a chemistry class to know what it is. I realize chemicals occur in nature, too, and some can be beneficial as additives, but overall should we really be eating and drinking products that come from a lab and not nature?
There was a time when most people had gardens and grew their own fruits and vegetables, usually with little or no chemical products. If they didn’t have gardens, or needed more fruits and vegetables, they could get locally or regionally grown items at a local market. They could get locally produced meats, cheese and milk produced without growth hormones or artificial additives. And even if the preparation techniques may have been questionable by today’s standards (specifically lots of frying, especially here in the South) overall people could get better nutrition without added chemicals.
The pendulum is swinging back to consuming locally produced foods and growing your own vegetables and fruits, but for most of the country we’re still dependent on big conglomerates and industrialized agriculture instead of family-owned farms and ranches for our food. Because of that, we need to be more aware of what they’re putting into the food chain, and, thus, into us.
If we want to keep artificial ingredients and additives out of our food, then we need to let these big companies and industrial farming consortiums know. The best way is to buy local, avoid those items with questionable ingredients or additives you don’t want, and to encourage others to do the same. Sure, it’s small drops in a big bucket, but we’ve seen how they can add up before to make changes, and it can happen again.
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