(Image from a 1914 FDA effort to get Americans to conserve food as part of the war effort, found via The Art of Food.)
In my attempt to avoid eating processed foods this week, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I, as someone who’s pretty aware of these issues and is committed to supporting my local food shed, found myself back in the habit of buying so much packaged and processed food. Many experts have written at length about our industrial food complex (I'm going to direct you to
Michael Pollan again, and the
Future of Food, and
Food Inc if you haven’t already checked them out), but I think bringing the reality of it into my own kitchen is the only way I can really make sense of this. Because what I really want to know is where I should draw the line between good and bad processed foods.
To get to the heart of that question, I went back to my marked up copy of
“In Defense of Food” to refresh my memory on the bigger picture of our food system. Here are a few things that jumped out:
1.) Factories that had been used to make ammunition during WWII were converted to produce nitrogen fertilizer, which was used by farmers to help increase crop yields.
2.) Around the same time,
DDT was used to control insects, which also helped increase yields. (There are now 20,000 pesticides registered with the EPA which is rather mind-blowing.)
3.) After a spike in food prices during the Nixon administration (mostly due to the passing on of the increase in the cost of fuel) caused major outcries, the government set about creating a system that encouraged farmers to grow corn, wheat and soybeans—think subsidies, where farmers are paid to grow crops regardless of their market value, and are often paid NOT to grow something—which continue to be the foundation of most of the cheap food on the supermarket shelves.
Since then, the industrial agricultural system has been focused on high yield crops that are easy to care for through mechanical harvesting and processing, reducing the amount of personal attention farmers had to give to their crops. So whereas most farms were growing a diverse range of crops a hundred years ago (which was also due to the fact that the farmers needed to feed their families more than just soybeans and wheat), a vast majority of what is being grown today is the same variety of plant.
Clearly, that is just skimming the surface, but what I get from all of that is there was a concerted push to grow a lot of food and charge us consumers less for it. Years later, this means that we Americans have some of the cheapest groceries in the western world. We aren’t, for the most part, actually paying for the true cost of our food because the system is in the middle of it. In fact, we actually pay less for our food than half of the planet with only less than 10% of our income, on average, being spent on food. As a comparison, Italians and French spend about 15% and our Spanish friends spent a little over 17%.
Not to mention that our industrialized food system is so normal to us that it’s much harder to extract ourselves from it than to simply go with it. (I recently heard a researcher say that if my generation wants to unplug from their electronically connected lives, they have to go out of their way to do it. I think the same thing can be said here for our relationship with industrialized food.) Which I now see is all related to how I found myself confronting boxes of inexpensive, though “natural”, packaged food at SuperTarget. (Disclaimer: when I first went to ST, I nearly shrieked with delight when I realized that the granola bars I’d been buying were a whole $2 less here than they were in Manhattan.) Over the past five years, more than 5,000 new organic packaged foods have been introduced onto the market, which is an astounding number that doesn’t even include products labeled “natural”. Clearly, this is why it’s hard to just eat whole foods.
Yesterday on our
facebook page, Given said that “To me, processed food is anything that is made in a factory/comes in packaging.” I like that. It differentiates between factory made food that’s intended to sit on a shelf for years and food that’s been preserved or processed in an attempt to extend its natural season. Like pickles, jam, jarred tomatoes, olives, cheese, butter and wine. And I think, in some cases, even chocolate. When I think of this type of a food product, I start to think of the people who are actually making them, which I also like. That helps me get a better sense of how I can evaluate food products going forward by asking a series of questions including: Where was this made/grown? Who made it? If it was processed, what was the intention? And also, do I understand why the ingredients in the food are in there?
Though of course, under the surface of all of this is the sheer time factor—as in how realistic is eating this way over the long term? Maybe it will just be a matter of getting into the habit of it, but that’s a topic for tomorrow!
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(Image from a 1914 FDA effort to get Americans to conserve food as part of the war effort, found via The Art of Food.)
In my attempt to avoid eating processed foods this week, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I, as someone who’s pretty aware of these issues and is committed to supporting my local food shed, found myself back in the habit of buying so much packaged and processed food. Many experts have written at length about our industrial food complex (I'm going to direct you to Michael Pollan again, and the Future of Food, and Food Inc if you haven’t already checked them out), but I think bringing the reality of it into my own kitchen is the only way I can really make sense of this. Because what I really want to know is where I should draw the line between good and bad processed foods.
To get to the heart of that question, I went back to my marked up copy of “In Defense of Food” to refresh my memory on the bigger picture of our food system. Here are a few things that jumped out:
1.) Factories that had been used to make ammunition during WWII were converted to produce nitrogen fertilizer, which was used by farmers to help increase crop yields.
2.) Around the same time, DDT was used to control insects, which also helped increase yields. (There are now 20,000 pesticides registered with the EPA which is rather mind-blowing.)
3.) After a spike in food prices during the Nixon administration (mostly due to the passing on of the increase in the cost of fuel) caused major outcries, the government set about creating a system that encouraged farmers to grow corn, wheat and soybeans—think subsidies, where farmers are paid to grow crops regardless of their market value, and are often paid NOT to grow something—which continue to be the foundation of most of the cheap food on the supermarket shelves.
Since then, the industrial agricultural system has been focused on high yield crops that are easy to care for through mechanical harvesting and processing, reducing the amount of personal attention farmers had to give to their crops. So whereas most farms were growing a diverse range of crops a hundred years ago (which was also due to the fact that the farmers needed to feed their families more than just soybeans and wheat), a vast majority of what is being grown today is the same variety of plant.
Clearly, that is just skimming the surface, but what I get from all of that is there was a concerted push to grow a lot of food and charge us consumers less for it. Years later, this means that we Americans have some of the cheapest groceries in the western world. We aren’t, for the most part, actually paying for the true cost of our food because the system is in the middle of it. In fact, we actually pay less for our food than half of the planet with only less than 10% of our income, on average, being spent on food. As a comparison, Italians and French spend about 15% and our Spanish friends spent a little over 17%.
Not to mention that our industrialized food system is so normal to us that it’s much harder to extract ourselves from it than to simply go with it. (I recently heard a researcher say that if my generation wants to unplug from their electronically connected lives, they have to go out of their way to do it. I think the same thing can be said here for our relationship with industrialized food.) Which I now see is all related to how I found myself confronting boxes of inexpensive, though “natural”, packaged food at SuperTarget. (Disclaimer: when I first went to ST, I nearly shrieked with delight when I realized that the granola bars I’d been buying were a whole $2 less here than they were in Manhattan.) Over the past five years, more than 5,000 new organic packaged foods have been introduced onto the market, which is an astounding number that doesn’t even include products labeled “natural”. Clearly, this is why it’s hard to just eat whole foods.
Yesterday on our facebook page, Given said that “To me, processed food is anything that is made in a factory/comes in packaging.” I like that. It differentiates between factory made food that’s intended to sit on a shelf for years and food that’s been preserved or processed in an attempt to extend its natural season. Like pickles, jam, jarred tomatoes, olives, cheese, butter and wine. And I think, in some cases, even chocolate. When I think of this type of a food product, I start to think of the people who are actually making them, which I also like. That helps me get a better sense of how I can evaluate food products going forward by asking a series of questions including: Where was this made/grown? Who made it? If it was processed, what was the intention? And also, do I understand why the ingredients in the food are in there?
Though of course, under the surface of all of this is the sheer time factor—as in how realistic is eating this way over the long term? Maybe it will just be a matter of getting into the habit of it, but that’s a topic for tomorrow!
