Last weekend you and I made brunch that we prided ourselves on for being healthy. Yogurt, whole-wheat bagels, fruit, cereal, almond milk, and orange juice. As college students, a giant bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios is healthy in comparison to a slice of cold pizza and a gallon of iced coffee. But I was recently made aware of the reality of our diets, of what we’re made to believe “isn’t THAT bad” versus what we should actually be eating. I’m not suggesting to strictly eat raw broccoli at all times, but understanding our place in relation to the processed food industry will potentially shift the nature of what we’re currently consuming, setting our bodies up to be balanced, healthy, and full (something we both complain about all the time). My perspective shifted because of a book I recently read about the food industry. Pandora’s Lunchbox by Melanie Warner was assigned to me in my Eating Industrial class to get us thinking about what goes in our bodies. This book deals with all kinds of foods, from the granola bars we grab every morning before rushing to class to the cup of strawberry yogurt we tell ourselves is healthy. It was a lot of information for me to take in, but I’ll break it down in a way that will hopefully be just as transformative for you as it was for me.
My initial assumption when I started reading this book was that Warner was going to tell us that the majority of Americans eat burgers and Cheetos for breakfast, that those highly processed foods are all bad for us and that we should stop eating them. She doesn’t. Warner deals with the realities of the processed food industry and common slipping random substances in foods we all eat every day, foods that you and I both deem “healthy.” She defines processed food and goes on to explain how the FDA allows for major companies to place substances in our food that were not present 100 years ago. She recognizes billion-dollar companies as investors and normal people trying to make a profit, along with their efforts to make our diets healthier, along with government intervention as well. She concludes by calling her readers to action – by telling them that the quality of their food consumption and the fate of their diets is in their own hands. In other words, don’t go to McDonald’s regularly if you would like to eat better – request healthy foods from those who can provide it to you. To begin with, Warner defines processed food as food that cannot be made in one’s kitchen. Do you have sodium benzoate readily available in your apartment pantry? The answer is most likely no, and if fifteen other variations of sodium are on the back of a jar of salsa you buy from Kroger, then it’s most likely highly processed. Although sodium is usually associated with the taste of saltiness, in the majority of these foods the concentration level can go undetected, causing us to underestimate the levels of sodium in a particular food. Another major part of the book is preservation. A big part of Warner’s research comes from her own experiments. In an attempt to see how long it would take for food to spoil, she purchased cereal, candy, and other snacks that all had expiration dates on them. She would store these past their expiration dates and see what the results were. Shockingly most of these foods were fine even after as long as six years, implying that preservation is a top priority for many of these companies. Preservation has been around for decades, and in the food industry it is inevitably connected to a brand all Americans know well: Kraft. J.L Kraft began buying cheese at a wholesale market, where the cheese would go bad too soon for his liking. Kraft accidentally boiled the cheese too much, and once all the bacteria and live cultures were absent, the cheese would last for days and weeks when canned. This changed everything. A similar need for preservation took place within Kellogg, where John Harvey Kellogg made granola from whole ingredients, until his younger brother added sugar. Kellogg then blew up, and soon after ingredient by ingredient began being added. Now, Kraft singles are “cheese product” as opposed to actual cheese. Most Kellogg cereals have over 14g of sugar per serving, if not more. Corn flakes alone now have added vitamins to them that are absent if their ingredients had been preserved in their actual fo. The need to add unnecessary elements to food to boost our vitamin intake is another big part of the narrative. If a bottle of anything has added vitamin-D, you might not be getting all the nutrients that come along with it from the whole, original product. This trumped the idea in my mind about the correlation of vitamins with the healthiness of certain foods. The FDA is another concern. There is absolutely no government regulation on what products can have added to them. Companies have the right to their own additives, the right to claim them as healthy. Although the FDA claims to be responsible for the safety of our food, the system in which they assess such safety has evolved into something ambiguous and ineffective. The term "G.R.A.S" stands for "Generally Recognized as Safe." Originally, this voluntary program was developed so that additives that are commonly deemed as safe can go unreviewed to avoid an overflow of additive revision. However, companies began to take advantage of this by simply not submitting their GRAS ingredients for review. This has allowed companies to add products to our foods that are not only hidden from us but not even reviewed to determine whether they are safe or not. This is just one of the many examples of the lack of transparency and the evolution of the nature of the food industry Warner addresses. Our food has become composed of things we do not understand, unfamiliar products physically living with us through our mass consumption of them. All of these examples add up to make a clear point by the end of the book. As a reader, you will be pushed to recognize these changes that have occurred in the last decades without us noticing. It seems as if we have slipped into a world of oblivion when it comes to our own food, one that’s hard to get out especially considering there is no government intervention. But I am hopeful, and I believe that step by step we can use this awareness to change the fate of processed foods. Authors like Warner is where this begins. I hope that I provided you with enough information to push you forward to actually make changes, whether they involve demanding transparency or shifting the nature of your own food habits. Love always, Lora
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