Sundays are grocery days for the Gilbert family.
Strategies have been devised; the list organized and divvied up in attempts to
make the excursion as painless as possible. Yet we still find ourselves trapped
between sky-high shelves laden with what we suppose is food, hidden underneath
the layers of plastic and wall of cardboard exterior. Images plastered onto the
front of the exterior give the shopper a glimpse of what the product might look
like. But where is the real food? Certainly not in the grocery store; here you only
find chemicals packed into ready to go boxes.
Have you ever read the ingredient
list of the food you purchase? Most don’t. Perhaps a couple healthy conscious parents
search for the exclusion of “high fructose corn syrup” from their child’s
Lunchable; perhaps the college student looks for a soda that doesn’t have aspartame.
But these are few and far between, the glances only fleeting. Since the few consumers willing to glance at the
ingredients list search for that single buzzword, the “aliases” of high
fructose corn syrup are found everywhere. These include: concentrated fruit
juice, dextrose, maltose, crystalline fructose, evaporated cane juice, raw
sugar, malt syrup, cane crystals, fructose. Due to the increasingly negative
connotation of “high fructose corn syrup”, the Corn Refiners Association
attempted to rename their sweetening agent “corn sugar” in May. The FDA
rejected this proposal saying it was misleading to consumers. But it does not take
much to mislead consumers. Most shoppers are clueless to what half the
ingredients even are. Take strawberry jelly for example; you would think there
would be strawberries, maybe some water, and a couple preservatives. In fact,
smashed into the glass container along with the strawberries are also: polydextrose, maltodextrin, fruit
pectin, citric acid, locust bean gum, natural flavor, potassium sorbate, sodium
benzoate, sucralose, calcium chloride, and artificial color. But really, why
should the inability to pronounce the half of ingredients you are consuming be
a weight on your conscious?
A weight on your conscious it
might not be, but a weight on your waistline is a guarantee. The irony of a
world divided between the obese and the emaciated, with the obese attempting to
fatten up the remaining 13.6% of the world, is ridiculous. The world now can be
represented on the two ends of the scale: those with far too few calories and
those with enough to drown in them. Recently
there has also been a move to include obesity as a third form of malnutrition.
Considering obesity as malnutrition expands the meaning of what had previously referred
to poor nutrition as due to lack of food inputs. Though it is poor nutrition, it
is certainly not typically due to a lack of calories, but rather too many. If
we were to label obesity as “malnutrition”, statistics would quickly tell us
that over half of the world’s population was suffering from some type of
malnutrition.
When you think of malnutrition, hunger is where the mind tends to go
first. Hunger is defined as the uneasy or painful sensation cause by want
of food. For most citizens of industrialized societies, the only uneasy,
possibly painful, sensation caused by food is when you have consumed double
your body weight in one sitting. Trends like overeating have caused the number
of obese people worldwide to double since 1980. According to Scientific
American, there are
actually more obese people in developing countries than there are hungry people
in developing countries. Now, let’s stop and think of a moment. Obesity, the 2nd
most preventable disease affects more people than hunger? What have we, a
highly developed society, done wrong? Well, for starters, over processing our
food.
In capitalist attempts to price products lower than the cost of the
competitor’s, the food industry has strayed away from actual food. Of all the
ingredients in strawberry jelly list previously, which did you actually know?
Strawberries, of course. And water. But what about the rest of it? What is “maltodextrin”?
Where does locust bean gum even come from? How exactly can you add “natural
flavors”? The food industry would tell you that maltodextrin is produced from starch by
partial hydrolysis and is usually found as a white hygroscopic spray-dried
powder; that locust bean gum is a galactomannan
vegetable gum extracted
from the seeds of the carob tree, mostly found in the Mediterranean
region; and “natural flavors” are basically a mixture of manmade
chemicals that make something taste kind of like it’s supposed to.
As the person eating all of this food, I’m not sure I want hygroscopic
powder in my food, let alone a ton of synthetic chemicals attempting to create
the taste of strawberry. All of a sudden the food industry decided that natural
food was less important than the shelf life of the food they would soon be
creating in laboratories. How many people have ever tasted the flavors of a
real strawberry? One that hasn’t been sprayed down with insecticide,
freeze-dried, or infected with synthetic flavoring? Probably not many. Our
society has decided that it’s okay for a once agriculturally based society to
abruptly have less than 1% of America growing food. So how are we able to
support a population of 314
million people? By creating fake food to sell at ridiculously low prices. Major
grocery stores have cut out every possible expensive, and many times this means
sacrificing the integrity of the food; choosing cheap man-made chemicals over the
Earth grown food our bodies were meant to eat. Over the decades, scientist have
experimented and found cheaper easier ways to supply our bodies with what it needs.
Along the way, they also found a way to condense the calorie intact of a single
day into one hamburger meal. Humans are wired to seek the easiest way to get
the most amount of calories they can in a single moment, hence our craving for
fatty, sugary foods instead of fruits and vegetables. The fast food market has
taken advantage of this fact, exploiting human nature to reap the benefits of
added profit as their addicted consumers’ pant sizes continue to skyrocket,
their consumers’ health to slip, and their consumers’ deaths due to obesity.
But this could stop. Rather than support food companies who surround their
synthetic food stuff in plastic wrapping and stick it into a cardboard box, why
don’t we give incentives to do just the opposite? By increasing production of “real”
food, America would be able to reduce the waistlines of its citizens, and ensure
continued health for everyone. The focus of our society needs to stop trying to
solve the entire world’s problem and look down for once. Maybe then we would
realize the problem has gotten so bad we can’t even see our own feet. North America has only 6 percent of the
world's population, but 34 percent all the human biomass in the world that is
due to obesity, the researchers from BMC Public Health said. If the trends of over processing and obesity continue, America may see
its shoreline slowing sinking into the ocean.
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