Eating Closer to the Root

The faintly crazy spectacle of salmonella-laced peanut paste turning up in more and more US food products probably isn't so funny if you come down infected. However, you have only yourself to blame. Well, yourself and nearly the entire manufactured food industry in the country.

Existing on manufactured food always entails risk of poor nutrition. Manufactured food has a small but non-zero risk of poisoning or infection. Peanut paste is just one of the non-zero instances.  Whatever its effects, the consequences of manufactured foods will be widely distributed and affect many people. This is simply because most people in "advanced" populations primarily eat manufactured food.

Avoiding manufactured food, which means eating principally real food, minimizes these risks. I think the human body evolved eating "peasant food," food most of the relatively poor members of society have eaten through the milennia. That is my personal nutrition strategy. I eat grains, fruits and vegetables. I am not a strict vegetarian, but my diet usually works as if I were. I eat a lot of basic stuff wrapped in flour tortillas. Basic food like rice, beans and lentils.

I am healthy. My weight is the same as it was when I was 30. I do not feel deprived. My food is not very expensive. My lipid levels delight my cardiologist. I don't spend much time eating.

Manufactured food, synthetic stuff compounded from generic ingredients, seems like a disaster always waiting to happen. Manufactured food comes out of a machine. Generic food-like ingredients also come out of machines. These machines can be anywhere in the world. Economies of scale drive the size of the machines up and aggregate them into factories. The same economies drive the number of factories down. Consequently, a problem in any food-like substance factory quickly becomes a very large problem indeed.

Without reiterating what Michael Pollan has said so well elsewhere, manufactured food is not really food. It is food-like. You can eat it. It will sustain life, more or less. You have no control over manufactured food. No preparation, "cooking" if you will, is involved. You unpackage manufactured food and eat it. Perhaps you combine several manufactured foods to make a common edible, a tiny cheese-like sandwich on soda crackers. Or you can just purchase the basic combinations already assembled wrapped in some clear film so strong it requires tools to penetrate.

Manufactured food is designed in food laboratories. It is designed to appeal to every appetizing characteristic that can be identified. It is usually sweet or salty and has great mechanical properties. The mechanical properties are known as "mouth feel." It is crispy or satiny or chewy or anything else humans have evolved to seek out in food.   No wonder manufactured food is popular.

Manufactured food is designed to have long shelf life. The packaging may contain a "best if eaten by" date, but it is usually just fine long after. The date is placed on the package primarily so some percentage of the product is destroyed before it is sold at retail. This keeps what is on the shelf "fresh" and increases the amount of the product that must be bought at wholesale.

Manufactured food has a long shelf life because it contains preservatives and because the packaging is designed to keep the product clean and to prevent oxygen and moisture from turning the product stale. I recently ate soda crackers that were stored on my smelly, damp sailboat for at least two years. They were perfect.

The nutrient content of manufactured food is also engineered. Food-like precursor ingredients are selected for low cost and their contribution to the product's appeal. Nothing particularly toxic to humans in normal doses is incorporated. The product has so many calories of energy, so much fat and so much protein. Lowest cost ingredients tend to inflate the fat and sugar content, but not so much as to become objectionable.  I think the nutrient content of manufactured food is secondary to what makes it appealing and profitable to sell.

By now you should have realized that manufactured food is far removed from a plant that grows in soil under the sun. The plants that manufactured foods come from are themselves highly engineered to produce maximum output and make use of as much synthetic fertilizer as possible. They are grown in large tracts of genetically identical plants, monocultures. Monocultures are extremely succeptible to infection by pathogenic organisms, so chemical pesticides and other artificial infection controls are mandatory.

I could go on and on. Not much associated with manufactured food seems really good. True, it supports a large population. I maintain it systematically malnourishes them, but that's my opinion. The manufactured food industry is more energy and resource intensive than farming the foods I eat. I can't prove it, but it seems quite likely. I avoid most manufactured food on principle. I believe I'm healthier for doing so. You should think about avoiding it too.