How Bad Are Ultraprocessed Foods, Really?
10th May 2024
As you might expect from a Voice of the Crust like the Times, the answer is ‘really bad’. And they focus on ‘how are they bad?’ rather than the more interesting question of ‘why are they bad?’.
Let’s start from scratch (no pun intended)(well, maybe a little bit….):
- People buy processed food because it gives them something to eat that takes less effort than ‘making it from scratch’–the same reason they drive cars rather than walk, the same reason they use washing machines and dishwashers rather than doing their laundry and their washing-up by hand. If I’m hungry, a Big Mac takes me ten minutes at the drive-through as opposed to an hour shopping at a grocery store and cooking it on a stove I might not even have (assuming that I even know how to cook, as most people today don’t). My mother learned how to cook at Home Ec in High School. When I was in High School, they didn’t even offer Home Ec, because obviously everybody was going to go to college and so we had no time for that working-class shit.
- ‘Prepared’ foods don’t last as long in storage as bulk food ingredients. Uncooked rice, flour, and pasta will last a loooooong time. Already-made-up dishes need to survive weeks or months traveling from the ‘factory’ to the store and from the store to the home and in the home until people sit down to eat them. To create these ‘shelf-stable’ comestibles, manufacturers load them up with ‘preservatives’ that keep them from going bad but give woke nutritionists the galloping never-get-overs. (Compare how long home-made bread lasts before going stale with the loaf you buy at Kroger.) Chemically-faked ‘artificial flavors’ also stay potent longer than those extracted from nature.
- People, when buying ‘prepared’ foods, prefer stuff that tastes good. (Surprise, surprise, surprise….) That’s why kids would rather eat Frosted Flakes than Grape Nuts. Modern parents want kids that are quiet rather than healthy. Hence the prevalence of taste-enhancers like high-fructose corn syrup and artificial flavors.
So there is it. People have preferences (the swine). Sellers of food pander to those preferences (the swine). The only reason Cola-Cola no longer contains cocaine is that it’s against the law. In a world in which none of the Common Folk have any agency, in which everything that is wrong is wrong because ‘the devil/corporation made me do it’, in which the reason a black teen shot his girlfriend is obviously the fault of Smith & Wesson, we need comprehensive regulation by the Cloud People so that the unenlightened will be saved from themselves.