Processed food: Healthy Eating and Misplaced Suspicion

Among the jokes, videos, and memes that circulated on social media during lockdown, you may have noticed the curious phenomenon of people (re)discovering the joys of making their own sourdough bread or baking cakes with their children. This is part of a wider, more established trend: a longing for the type of wholesome, home-cooked food that many people no longer enjoy on a daily basis.

To be clear, I find this trend mostly positive. I enjoy cooking; I cook every day, and I think teaching children about nutrition and giving them the skills to cook meals from scratch would be a massive positive in terms of public health. However, there is another, more insidious side to this phenomenon: the implicit guilt-tripping of time-starved parents.

The reality is that not everyone has the time to cook two nutritionally balanced meals a day for a family of picky eaters. Fortunately, we live in a society where we have access to a multitude of processed or semi-finished ingredients, culinary preparations, and ready meals.

It’s easy to patronise people who eat “junk food”, but everyone eats processed food to a greater or lesser extent. How many people actually make their own bread? How many people have the foresight, time or inclination to prepare a stock when they want to make a soup? Of course, this is a reductio ad absurdum, but the point is that almost everyone buys and consumes processed food when it suits them, and that’s okay.

Processed food gets a bad rap, but few people realise how it important it was in the women’s emancipation movement. The washing machine is often cited as being the archetypal labour-saving device, but historical records show that the invention of the washing machine didn’t lead to housewives spending less time doing washing; it led to them doing more washes. The advent of processed food, on the other hand, was a true time-saver. The next step is to normalise men in the kitchen, and it would seem that change is afoot on that front too...

Moreover, the industrial-scale production of food and beverages makes it possible to produce large amounts of food more efficiently, which is an important consideration in heavily populated urban areas. The technologies and methods developed for industry have created a system that is capable of guaranteeing an adequate supply of safe food to large populations.

Suspicion of the food industry is unsurprising after a number of high-profile of scandals, but nostalgia for yesteryear is misplaced. The good old days never existed. Food is actually much safer now, and more people have access to abundant amounts of varied and affordable food. This is largely due to the industrialisation of agriculture and food manufacturing.

All this is not to say that we should all eat ice cream and popsicles for every meal; it is merely an appeal to reason. We must learn to read the labels; processed food is not by definition high in fat and sugar, or packed with carcinogenic additives, and canned or frozen foods make it easier for families to eat vegetables regularly while avoiding spoilage. In short, I advocate more education and less self-righteousness.

I’ll leave it there for today. I have to go and refresh my organic rye starter…