As millennials, our issue is not food quality. We have a food trust issue. We don’t live in the times of Upton Sinclair’s ‘The Jungle’ anymore, even though labels from back then matured and reach us in strange ways today. In the United States, terms on food packages such as “controlled farming,” “natural,” and “alternative animal husbandry” mislead. What do they even mean? Control of a tent over your crops? Natural doesn’t mean squat and an alternative to animal husbandry? I’ll let you imagine that one.
The food culture of where you come from varies in religion, climate, environment, politics, history, agriculture, economy, technological traffic, and more. The cultural stance of the system of eating lies between hunger and being full. We satisfy our hunger with learned traditional methods. Sadly, in most places, the fortification of our traditional methods has evolved to conventional farming for quantity, not quality.
The term “conventional farming” sounds innocent at first, until you find out that it uses a chemical cocktail of fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides, genetically altered seeds, antibiotics, and growth hormones for livestock. It’s a farm on testosterone. Sadly, conventional farming and animal rearing has become our baseline in food, which imposes massive problems. Permaculture, organic farming, and grass-fed livestock are sustainable yet pricey both, for the farms and for us. They're also worth it to our health and environment. A more affordable, accessible, and also a healthy alternative to an organic diet could be a diet of non or minimally processed foods.
Diets such as Paleo, Keto, Intermittent Fasting, and all the ones that are cringe to mention have one obvious thing in common, a restriction. The person avoids this or that with their diet. An organic diet sounds lovely but can cost an arm and a leg. Where is the food or diet trend that restricts processed foods or at least suggests minimally processed foods? There is no catchy name for it, except perhaps minimal processed food diet. MPF may sound bland, but it would be tremendously more nutritious than any of the catchy-sounding ones.
In order to understand the benefits of MPF, let’s look at what happens during food processing. The processing already begins with the cocktail of chemicals in the feeding of crops. After gathering the crops and slaying the animals, the processing continues. There lies another problem. The processing robs the food of all, if not most of its nutrients. Let’s look at a staple in our kitchens, a favourite processed food — rice. What we know as white rice simply is brown rice flipped and became Michael Jackson. Brown rice loses most of its nutrients, fibres, minerals, and vitamins while getting processed. The outcome of white rice is re-fortified with some of the same or other nutrients. It seems like quite a lot of work that our own bodies can do well on their own.
Processed foods are difficult to avoid, it's most of what we eat such as anything that’s frozen, canned, baked, or dried. Breakfast cereals, cheese, bread, snacks, cold cuts, cakes, biscuits, soft drinks, and milk to name a few. Now, I am sure you ask: are all processed foods bad? The answer is no, the negative is that you don’t have control over how much fat, salt, and sugar you consume. You have control, however, with what and where you buy your food. Start with supporting your local farmers if you can.
With the pressure of over-consumption, you can walk down the aisle of your supermarket and notice the products most processed dominate the centre aisles, whereas the outer aisles have the fruits and vegetables on the outskirts — just like an eagle eye image of our megacities. Yet unlike bio or organic, conventional fruits and veggies are sprayed with chemicals and have pesticidal residue. Especially the “dirty dozen” a small list of the most contaminated fruits and vegetables where kale and collard greens are on top of that list and had up to a mind-boggling 21 different pesticides, stocked up and ready for sale!
As Wilhelm H. Riehl said, “Nowhere is man more conservative than when it comes to food.”
How does this translate to what comes to our plates? The EU regularly checks for compliance with strict guidelines for several organic or ‘bio’ labels but still falls under criticism, with some farms that can slide into categories of organic but the other half of that same farm conventional. Contradictory? Absolutely! With all these greenwashing antics I would like to see more transparency and accountability for organic and conventional produce. We sort of trust the beef’s label for quality which we really shouldn’t and that makes us verify labels and ingredients which is time-consuming and tiring.
It’s important to our health that we pay attention and avoid ingredients on labels such as E432 or something freaky like sodium nitrite/nitrate, aspartame, diglycerides, high fructose corn syrup, carrageenan, artificial colours, sodium benzoate, dactyl, propylparaben or potassium bromate. Pretty much anything that doesn’t sound healthy or like food. Better yet avoid food products with over 5 ingredients and products that have health claims on the front of the package, it’s a scam. The more ingredients on the labels the more processed it is.
It’s heavy to imagine what food is made from and what happened to it now. It feels like a mad chemist is mixing up many powders and liquids to make a new food product for the masses. Where they scream with laughter when they struck success and concocted the perfect dosage. In the middle of the night with the rain pouring down and lightning crackling in the distance, of course.
So, how to eat minimally processed? Just please keep an eye out for the labels and their freaky fluff, the added sugars, salts, and fats. Be hesitant, be skeptical! We have that right. Don’t trust the behemoth food companies and their ‘health’ slogans, don’t let them fool you. Be aware of what you buy and from which companies. Eat local or regional and support your farmers! It’s vital for our health and future generations. How and where we spend our money makes a massive impact on change whether or not we realise it. It’s a change for the better, as cheesy as it sounds.