The Solution is Better Industrialized Processed Foods, Not a Utopian Fantasy || BLURB

Sometimes when you want to say something but someone else says it far better than you can ever say it, this is how I felt about the article "A Plea for Culinary Modernism" by Rachel Laudan, who I recently found on twitter. I resonate with her way of thinking because the solution to end obesity, chronic conditions and world hunger isn't demonization of industrially processed foods but to improve them. When a car doesn't work, you improve it, rather than go back to riding horses or walking on foot. Something similar has happened with the industrial clothing industry where the public now enjoys industrially manufactured clothes rather than sewing them at home. The same should happen with processed foods too. Our goal at Ketogeek has been to do exactly that but this requires understanding structural components of foods and how they connect together to make something healthy. We need smart consumerism and educators that aren't dogmatically against processed foods.

Without further ado, let me bring to you the article and an excerpt that I love:

"That food should be fresh and natural has become an article of faith. It comes as something of a shock to realize that this is a latter-day creed. For our ancestors, natural was something quite nasty. Natural often tasted bad.

Fresh meat was rank and tough; fresh milk warm and unmistakably a bodily excretion; fresh fruits (dates and grapes being rare exceptions outside the tropics) were inedibly sour, fresh vegetables bitter. Even today, natural can be a shock when we actually encounter it. When Jacques Pepin offered free-­range chickens to friends, they found “the flesh tough and the flavor too strong,” prompting him to wonder whether they would really like things the way they naturally used to be. Natural was unreliable. Fresh fish began to stink. Fresh milk soured, eggs went rotten.

Everywhere seasons of plenty were followed by seasons of hunger when the days were short. The weather turned cold, or the rain did not fall. Hens stopped laying eggs, cows went dry, fruits and vegetables were not to be found, fish could not be caught in the stormy seas.

Natural was usually indigestible. Grains, which supplied from fifty to ninety percent of the calories in most societies have to be threshed, ground, and cooked to make them edible. Other plants, including the roots and fibers that were the life support of the societies that did not eat grains, are often downright poisonous. Without careful processing green potatoes, stinging taro, and cassava bitter with prussic acid are not just indigestible, but toxic."

Read the Complete Article HERE!