
Not All Industrial Food Is Evil - robg
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/not-all-industrial-food-is-evil/?hp&_r=0
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JoeAltmaier
What a loaded title. The article is much more balanced than it might seem.

<rant> Most of our modern food is very, very good for us. Compared to the
alternative.

There's some magical thinking that nature intended us to eat some foods and
not others. This is confused at best. Nature consists of a system of every-
creature-for-itself. Those 'natural' foods were doing their very best to kill
you whilst propagating their seeds. The foods we historically ate were just
those that injured us slowly enough that we could still reproduce.

Nowadays we can assay foodstuffs and make a chart of their benefits vs issues.
For the first time in history we can know which hurt us quickly, and which
slowly. Take it one step further. Processed foods are those where we can
remove the injurious portions and keep the part that benefits us. Add
hybridizing and we can make that easier by having desirable components in
higher proportions. Modern farming techniques allow feeding our teeming
billions without periodic starvation, even in 'bad years' i.e. irrigation,
chemicals to suppress competition (bugs, fungi, other weeds).

Comes down to this: eat 'natural', eat 'organic', you are one in a million
that can afford to indulge yourself with fad/cult foods at the expense of your
carbon footprint. Go ahead; its a free country. But please no more with the
evangelizing - only a tiny fraction of us can afford that foolishness. And
some of us find it offensive, like eating cheetah or endangered animal meat.
You indulge yourself, inflate your carbon footprint drastically, to keep your
karma aligned or whatever. Cottage industries spin up that are devoted to
taking your money and giving you whatever the food of the month is. All very
self-indulgent seen from the outside.

Anyway, I thank civilization for providing me with a corn-based food
infrastructure that guarantees plentiful calories and protein, and even some
variety, year in and year out.

