Revolt Against Food

The other day, I was making a dinner of chicken breasts, roasted cauliflower and rice pilaf when it occurred to me that many Americans, maybe even most of us, no longer know what food is. Per the dictionary, food is defined as "material, usually of plant or animal origin, that contains or consists of essential body nutrients…" The problem with this definition is that we now eat things that are often so far removed from their plant or animal origins as to be unrecognizable. Most products that come in packages these days are so stripped of their original nutrients that they are "fortified" with added artificial vitamins and minerals. Interestingly, the food processors and manufacturers, rather than apologizing for having to add back into their products the original nutrients, have turned the conversation on its ear through their marketing and made the addition of artificial nutrients a bonus! So it occurred to me that we need to re-examine what food is.

First let's look at what food isn't, or more appropriately, what isn't food. BHT isn't food. It is used in many packaged foods to preserve freshness. Artificial color isn't food. It is used to make prepared foods more visually appealing (or to make your kids think some foods are super-fun). I don't know how many people know this, but "natural flavor" isn't really natural. Depending on how a flavor is created, whether it is extracted from a plant or other source via solvent versus a chemical reaction, it can be labeled "natural flavor." If it is created by mixing a bunch of chemicals together, it certainly cannot be called natural, and it also certainly isn't food. When I read the label off a packaged loaf of bread at the grocery store, I feel like I should have gotten a PhD in chemistry just for getting to the end of the list. When my aunt makes bread it consists of yeast, flour, water, a little oil or butter, and a little
salt. That's it. If I actually force myself to pick up a box of Trix, or some other wholly repulsive packaged product, I am usually horrified by the litany of non-food ingredients. So I ask you, should we really call it food just because it's edible?

I happen to have a box of "goldfish" here in my house. The first and most striking thing about them is their shape. I've gotta hand it to the person who thought of creating a goldfish-shaped cracker from that weirdly orange dough. So think about it… wheat, mechanically pulverized into a fine powder, mixed with cheddar cheese that was colored with annatto, a "natural" food dye, some oils, spices and yeast products, all pressed into a cute shape, baked and packaged. I actually allow these into my house because they do not contain BHT, BHA, artificial flavor or colors (again, though, if you have to add color at all, is it really natural??), and no other unpronounceable chemicals or unrecognizable ingredients. But when I think about it more, I have to ask myself, "Why?" Why would I allow anyone in my family to eat these aberrations of food? Because I appreciate the marketing giants' creativity? No. The answers are the usual ones. They are extremely convenient, my children like them, and they are difficult to avoid since they are seemingly ubiquitous. The McDonald's reasons. None of which are good reasons. So let's look at how to change what we view as food. There are lots of movements out there in the food world to look to as a guide. Slow food, organic food, raw food, vegetarianism, veganism, caloric restriction, the Atkins', South Beach, Feingold, Mediterranean, Rotation, and Elimination diets… It gets absolutely dizzying if you are looking into it in order to figure out what is healthy to eat. But, as with most things, I believe there is a simple way to figure it out. I once heard someone say that if you can't pick it or shoot it, you probably shouldn't eat it. I think I like this concept the best. Apples are food. Pears, pork chops and peas are food. Rice, chicken and broccoli are food. Perhaps crackers and breads are food, but maybe they are a little further
away from the source than you want to be most of the time. One school of thought out there is that people have gotten so good at innovating, that we are outpacing our bodies' ability to adapt to the new foods we are creating. Plant hybridization was a fast way to evolve fruits, veggies and legumes to be more pest, drought and blight resistant. Gene splicing has out-paced that geometrically. Just what is a Grapple, anyway??? I have heard them called Franken-foods, by the way. I thought that was funny, in a wry kind of way. rBGH is not food and shouldn't be near your source of food, in my opinion. BHA and BHT, doubly so. If we're evolving faster than the foods we're creating, certainly it can't be a good idea to actually eat chemicals!! I think that if you wouldn't feed it directly to your children by the spoonful, perhaps it shouldn't be injected into their food supply. Another way to look at it is, if you wouldn't cook with it yourself, why is it in your package? Now, far be it for me to say that all packaged and prepared foods are poison; I don't believe this… entirely… But I do think we should really consider what is in the package or wrapper more than the marketing pitch before we buy. Forget the pictures and the commercials, read the ingredients.

A celebrity gourmet by the name of Jamie Oliver has started a movement called the Food Revolution taking aim at people's typical eating habits. I think it is brilliant and horribly overdue, and I also think it is a shame. A shame that we have strayed so far off the path of good eating that we actually have to revolt against the fast and packaged food marketing machines in order to get ourselves back on track, but so be it. Dump the Flamin' Hot Cheetos into the disposal while eating a peach. Power to the people!!