
My Great Grandmother’s Industrially Processed Food - heydenberk
http://www.rachellaudan.com/2015/07/great-grandmothers-industrially-processed-food.html?repost=hn_encouraged
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kazinator
Mostly about _mechanical_ processing. Of course, the circulating epigram
"don't eat something your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food" refers
to processing with additives: artificial flavors, colors, preservatives and
conditioners of various kinds. Not to mention almost completely synthetic
concoctions.

It doesn't mean, for instance, "don't use soy sauce that has been processed
the same way by the same company in Japan since the 1600's"; that is a
horribly strawman interpretation of the idea.

~~~
Spooky23
It's all about thinking about some idealistic past.

If great-grandma wasn't wealthy, she ate lots of tinned beef smothered in
potassium nitrate, all sorts of stuff packed in gelatin/salt, etc over the
winter. And lots of beans.

Most of my great-grandmothers were the daughters of Irish farmer. She probably
shared a house with a cow and a dozen siblings, if they were lucky enough to
own one. They had fresh milk with no anti-biotics, but also with no
pasteurization or medical care for the cow. (Hopefully she didn't get sick.)
No plastic bottles, but they drew water from a hand-dug well in a treeless
landscape where cattle were the main farming activity. (ie. high probability
of a contaminated water source) When you got to march, you didn't have to
worry about pesticides in potatoes, but you did have to watch for worms.

~~~
coldtea
> _It 's all about thinking about some idealistic past. If great-grandma
> wasn't wealthy, she ate lots of tinned beef smothered in potassium nitrate,
> all sorts of stuff packed in gelatin/salt, etc over the winter. And lots of
> beans._

Not sure in which parts of the world this holds true.

In my part of the world, and we're talking a really pour country, everybody
had their patch with vegetables etc, people caught fish, had animals (chicken
etc) and all that. Most of the things they ate were fresh. For the non-fresh
staff, they simply preserved it in salt (like they did with cod), or brine
(e.g. for goat cheese, etc), or they dried it.

No "tinned beef smothered in potassium nitrate" and no "gelatin".

I'd say most of the places in Europe were like this, and some were still like
that up until the 60s or 70s. And maybe people in NY, a huge city without ways
to have your own produce and animals, ate all the "tinned beef" stuff, but I
can't imagine many people doing that in Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, etc.

> _Most of my great-grandmothers were the daughters of Irish farmer. She
> probably shared a house with a cow and a dozen siblings, if they were lucky
> enough to own one. They had fresh milk with no anti-biotics, but also with
> no pasteurization or medical care for the cow. (Hopefully she didn 't get
> sick.) No plastic bottles, but they drew water from a hand-dug well in a
> treeless landscape where cattle were the main farming activity. (ie. high
> probability of a contaminated water source) When you got to march, you
> didn't have to worry about pesticides in potatoes, but you did have to watch
> for worms._

That's how people lived even up to the '70s in large parts of European
countryside (Span, Italy, Greece, France, etc). From everybody I've talked to
who lived like that in several countries, it wasn't particularly hard or bad.
Farm work could be intensive but only for specific times of the year, most of
the year they didn't have to do much if at all. And living with several
siblings in a small house was just what everybody did, so they didn't feel
they miss out on anything. Most of the time they were out and around in the
village anyway.

~~~
jacobolus
Basically all agricultural societies have historically been feudal, with a
small minority of nobles, scribes, and clergy; a larger group of soldiers,
merchants, and tradesmen; and a mass of peasant farmers (some such societies
still persist today). The peasants, whether formally free or slaves, were
almost everywhere treated as a disposable resource by the nobles, who stole,
raped with abandon, killed on a whim, and believed themselves to be innately
superior. For peasants, food was often scarce even in rich lands during
prosperous times, and the majority of calories came from staple starches.
Winter was _hard_. Peasants mostly lived in simple poorly insulated houses,
cooked over indoor hearths (= much worse air to breathe than heavy cigarette
smoking or modern industrial air pollution), lacked modern understanding and
infrastructure for sanitation, had poor access to medicine or other healthcare
(only healers with knowledge of local plants and religious figures to pray for
them), had little if any formal education, etc. etc.

Pre-mechanized agriculture, along with completely decentralized child-rearing,
food preparation, hauling water from a well or river, weaving and sewing,
house construction, carpentry, etc. just takes an absurdly enormous amount of
manual work, and when the local strong-men demand their cut in return for
protection, there’s little left over for the peasants.

Life expectancy, health, median material wealth, gender/social equality, &c.
were across-the-board dramatically worse in agricultural societies than in
hunter/gatherer societies.

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trgn
My mother-in-law, who grew up in a Midwestern city in the 40s-50s, recently
mentioned it is much easier to get fresh produce today, than when she was
young. For her, growing up, canned vegetables were the norm, fresh greens were
a treat.

For my own parents it is the opposite. Around the same time, they lived in an
exurb, fairly rural environment, and ate with the seasons. They live a
suburban area now, and eat more canned goods now than they used to.

I was surprised to hear that eating processed foods was so common already
60-70 years ago.

~~~
jakejake
Canning and jarring your own food was also extremely common - my great
grandfather had a basement full of stuff they had grown and then preserved
themselves. The idea of buying canned veggies wasn't unusual or unhealthy at
all - except perhaps being viewed as lazy or a waste of money.

Also, there weren't chemicals involved other than a lot of salt & vinegar.

~~~
Spooky23
My wife and I actually do this. It saves quite a bit of money (we can buy a
bushel of green beans from a farm 45 minutes away for $15) and it's kind of
fun to experiment with.

We do the same with meat, but that is mostly frozen.

The whole pseudo-science around "whole food" and "too much processing" is just
that. Bunk. I spent my college and 20s years getting fatter because I ate a
lot of fast food and restaurant meals (loaded with sugar and carbs), drank a
lot of beer, and spent a lot of time sitting on my ass at work.

The McDonald's cheeseburger isn't bad for you because it's "processed", it's
bad for you because it's 350 calories, served with another 300 calories of
fried potatoes and at least 20 oz of sugar water. The seemingly healthier
burrito at Chipolte is pretty much the same... although you can contemplate
the more humane treatment of the pig/cow/chicken.

~~~
pyre
> The whole pseudo-science around "whole food" and "too much processing" is
> just that. Bunk.

The idea is that you want to get closer to the source. For example, getting
produce from the store that was shipped from Guam is possibly laden with
chemicals used to preserve it until it reaches your grocery store. On the
other hand, buying direct from the farm cuts out the need for that.

Also, food that has been cooked and recooked several times, then blended with
food artificial preservatives is probably less healthy than (on average) than
the food you make yourself from scratch.

Combine that with the fact that many industries explicitly target the "bliss
point" when formulating their recipes... and you're probably better off with a
home-cooked meal than a frozen microwave dinner.

~~~
mikeash
I'm confused about your "bliss point" statement. That sounds like a good thing
to me. Why is that a downside?

~~~
jschwartzi
If you could continually get wonderful feelings just from eating a product,
and the product never made you feel full, you might continue eating it until
you've consumed an entire package. At that point, you read the back and
realize that you just ate 3000 calories in a single sitting and have a little
panic attack.

~~~
mikeash
This sounds an awful lot like saying that food ought to taste bad so you don't
eat too much of it.

I'd rather have food that tastes good but is still something I'm able to eat
in moderation. I get that food makers have no incentive whatsoever to get me
to eat in moderation, but that looks like a different thing from the "bliss
point."

~~~
pyre
It doesn't have to taste bad to force you to eat it in moderation. There are
examples out there. People complain that Pepsi is too sweet, and you can only
drink a small amount before they can't drink anymore. You could also talk
about the salt levels on certain foods (where after a certain amount they
start tasting too salty, etc). Food makers want their food to _never_ make you
say, "Ok, that's enough this is getting too {sweet,salty,sugary,etc}". That's
different from the food tasting bad.

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muxxa
Also, Cassava, a food first domesticated 10,000 years ago and a current staple
for over 'half a billion people', is toxic (Cyanide) unless processed.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassava#Food_use_processing_an...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassava#Food_use_processing_and_toxicity)

~~~
david-given
Potatoes are quite toxic --- they're related to deadly nightshade. The
versions we eat are heavily engineered so that the tubers produce survivably
small quantities of toxin. (Wild potatoes produce it as a defense mechanism.)
However it's possible to stimulate otherwise safe potatoes into producing high
quantities of the stuff via mishandling. People have died.

[http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/horrific-tales-
of...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/horrific-tales-of-potatoes-
that-caused-mass-sickness-and-even-death-3162870/?no-ist)

In the 1960s some potato breeders accidentally produced a poisonous breed of
potato by crossing two perfectly harmless versions, and some people (mostly
the potato breeders themselves!) were quite ill before anyone realised what
was going on.

[http://boingboing.net/2013/03/25/the-case-of-the-poison-
pota...](http://boingboing.net/2013/03/25/the-case-of-the-poison-potato.html)

Also, _seriously_ don't eat potato berries.

~~~
MrBuddyCasino
Same thing with Zucchini. Resently someone died here in Germany because a
neighbour gave him a home grown one. Don't eat them if they taste bitter!

~~~
greggman
And yet peopl eat "bitter gourd" in China and "Goya" in Okinawa, both super
bitter. Are those bad too and they just don't know any better?

~~~
kragen
We taste a lot of different chemicals as bitter, including cucurbitacin,
persin, quinine, solanine, strychnine, momordicin, cyanide, and benzaldehyde,
and consequently amygdalin. Apparently we have 25 or more different bitter
taste receptors sensitive to more than 500 different bitter chemicals. The
lethal doses of these chemicals in proportion to their bitterness vary
enormously, and of course they also vary according to the situation: the
momordicins in bitter melons are fine most of the time, but bitter melons are
an abortifacient (possibly due to an effect of the momordicins) so you
shouldn't eat them if you're pregnant. (There are other inexpensive means of
abortion, such as misoprostol, which have been carefully studied and shown to
be safe in the first trimester.) And different chemicals extracted from bitter
melons have been shown to be cytotoxic in vitro and might be useful against
cancer; some hepatotoxicity has also been shown.
[https://www.mskcc.org/cancer-care/integrative-
medicine/herbs...](https://www.mskcc.org/cancer-care/integrative-
medicine/herbs/bitter-melon)

So I would say, _no_ , they're not bad. But don't go overboard.

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jallmann
Pretty great article. It really blows my mind how different the food we eat
today is, as compared to 500, 100 or even 50 years ago.

For a long time, _salt_ was precious and highly sought after. Sugar, at least
the granulated form, has been "non-exotic" for only a few hundred years -- the
article talks about sugar beet milling, and refers to the massive plantations
of slaves used to harvest sugarcane. Even tomatoes are a New World crop --
imagine Italian food without tomato sauce.

Heck, I remember when some fruits or vegetables were strictly seasonal -- now,
we can get everything year-round, for basically the same price.

Sure, there is a lot of chemically laden, industrially processed crap on
supermarket shelves. But it is also easier to eat better now than ever before,
not to mention the sheer variety of foods we have available.

~~~
ajmurmann
I read in Fernand Braudele's "Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century
Volume 1" that bread in many regions was only baked 2-3 times a year. Bread
would grow mold or get that hard that people would chop it with an axe!

~~~
jallmann
Very interesting! Another book that touches on food history is Jared Diamond's
Guns, Germs and Steel, which talks a bit about the domestication of
agricultural crops. So much of what we grow today bears little to no
resemblance to their wild varieties. Eg, cabbage, broccoli, kale, and brussels
sprouts all come from the same wild plant. Organic and GMO fuss aside, humans
have been very, very good at manipulating our environment and food sources for
a long time...

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w1ntermute
Rachel Laudan (the author of the post) was interviewed on EconTalk last week:
[http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/08/rachel_laudan_o.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/08/rachel_laudan_o.html)

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contingencies
FWIW there's been a flurry of interesting torrents on the subject of food
preservation and processing over the last couple of years.

