Cleaning up after breakfast this morning, I was thinking about my homemade bacon (more on that later) versus commercial bacons. My bacon should keep in the fridge for about a week, and in the freezer up to three months, according to everything I’ve read so far. Commercial bacon has a much longer fridge life, judging by the “use or freeze by” date on the package. Some of this may be attributed to differences in the makeup of the cure itself, but I’ll bet that there are also additives and preservatives in there to extend the shelf life.
Additives and preservatives have been vilified in the movement to eat healthier with statements such as “If you can’t say it, don’t eat it”, and I do believe in that sentiment – modern diets contain many chemicals intended to prevent spoilage, extend shelf life, maintain texture, and essentially push food beyond what it would naturally be capable of.
However, my degree is in chemical engineering, and I definitely believe that advances in food chemistry and food science have improved our lives. If I didn’t have preservatives in my foods, I’d almost certainly throw away and waste more food from spoilage. I believe that chemical additives such as citric acid (preservative), xanthan gum (stabilizer/thickener), mono- and diglycerides (emulsifier), and so on are subject to more testing and scrutiny, and while the scientific process isn’t perfect – things once previously believed safe can be later deemed unhealthy – it is a controlled system with a set of regulatory processes in place. On an individual basis, I’ll accept the science behind food additives. (Or, to paraphrase the web comic XKCD: Science. It works, bitches. And for the curious, here’s the reference.)
And that’s the key phrase – on an individual basis. While any of these alone or in a particular food may not be harmful, the fact is that the same set of additives are everywhere, in all sorts of places where you wouldn’t expect it. That makes it extremely difficult to maintain balance and moderation; some of these in your food won’t hurt you, but a lot won’t be healthy for you. Take one of the most sensationalized debates on this topic right now, high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Much has been written on the negative effects of the prevalence of HFCS in our food supply, prompting the corn industry to launch its own set of television commercials in rebuttal. At its core, HFCS is made by taking one sugar (glucose) and turning it into another sugar (fructose), resulting in something as sweet as table sugar (sucrose) but much cheaper and stable to produce. You shouldn’t need me to tell you that eating too much sugar will make you overweight, regardless of whether it’s table sugar or HFCS. The problem that HFCS is in nearly everything you’d purchase from the store.
So, what’s the solution? Tariffs and subsidies to change the economics of sweeteners and food additives? Public outcries leading to bans? The radical restructuring of commercial food production in the modern world?
At the heart of this, I don’t believe that it’s the producers we should rail against for the use of additives, but we as consumers and human beings need to be responsible for what we eat. When I cook from scratch, I know exactly what goes into our food. I can’t practically cook every meal of the day from scratch, but I can balance commercially prepared foods with homemade foods and cut back our intake. The point is, it’s my responsibility to maintain this balance – I won’t offload that decision to commercial food companies to watch for me.
Citations:
Harris, William. "Top 10 Most Common Ingredients in Fast Food." 04 May 2009. HowStuffWorks.com. <http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/10-ingredients-fast-food.htm> 06 September 2009.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Homemade bacon??? I’m speechless.
rest of article interesting, informed, thought-provoking.
Really homemade?
Homemade bacon? You’re raising pigs in your back yard? Don’t the netighbors complain?
Mom: Heh. Yes. I finally found a source locally for pork belly and sodium nitrite. It’s wonderful. I’m in the process of writing it up.
Dad: Hah. No, I’m not raising pigs in our backyard (although tempting….) – I can now get raw pork belly without driving to the other side of Houston or farther. I’ve done all the curing, omitted the final smoking step (I don’t have a smoker, and I wasn’t feeling THAT MacGuyver-ish), but it’s delicious.
I don’t ever want to know what pork belly has to do with bacon.
But your bacon does sound good.
Most of my response would be a reference to some Michael Pollan work, so I will merely note that, if you haven’t read him (and I kind of assume you have), you should. He’s a good writer, if nothing else.
I’m going to question your assertion that science has vetted these “chemicals” (as the husband of a chemistry teacher, I know how ridiculous it is to vilify chemicals as a group), though. I mean, it’s done its best, no doubt, but the fundamental problem is that you can’t really apply the scientific method to people when it comes to eating.
Let me say this another way. If you want to test a preservative’s effect on, say, meat, it’s easy. Take several cuts of meat, as identical as you can make them. Subject them all to identical conditions, except that part of the group gets the preservative. Test the meat cuts after some period of time, and draw your conclusion. Easy.
Now try to test the effects of that preservative on people, using the same, scientific method. You can’t. You can’t get anywhere close to changing just one variable. People aren’t like that. They eat different foods. In different amounts. Their digestive tract is a bafflingly complex collection of chemicals. To say nothing of how their personal habits (exercise, etc.) affect the situation.
And, on top of that, there’s the question of whether the effect of any preservative will be long-term, not short.
I’m not actually a huge hater of modern food science. As much as I read Michael Pollan and like to shop at the farmer’s market (or at least the local grocery store with plenty of local, organic options), I also ate at Taco Bell yesterday. (What can I say, they really know how to mix their chemicals up to make something horribly, awfully appealing.)
But I don’t, fundamentally, trust modern food science. I think most of the effort goes into testing that the product “works”, as defined by: looks right, feels right, tastes right, stores right, travels right. And missing or ignored is the question of whether it’s actually, truly healthy.
As to your rhetorical question about “Tariffs and subsidies to change the economics of sweeteners and food additives?” … Well, if you’ve read Pollan, then you realize that the current state of food science, which is overwhelmingly derived from only two crops (corn and soybeans) is due to the subsidies that already exist. Removing those would go a long way, in my opinion, to balancing out the costs away from junk food and towards food food.
I also think that there’s something to subsidizing farmers who grow food that’s actually healthy for us (e.g. broccoli, spinach, and all those vegetables we all know we’re supposed to eat). One complaint about eating healthy is how expensive it is. Why in the world is it more expensive to make a fresh salad than to eat a cheeseburger with fries? (Answer: because of corn subsidies, among other things.)
You (and I, when I don’t eat out at fast food — which I usually regret afterward) cook your own food not only because you like to do so, but because you can afford to. How absurd is it that our government spends taxpayer dollars to ensure that, for those less well off, HFCS is cheap and abundant, tilting the economics for them towards making that choice to buy something with HFCS? Is that the best use of our government money? Would that hypothetically poor family eat better if cheeseburgers necessarily cost $10 to produce, but salad greens were $.50 a bundle?
Todd, I have to admit that I haven’t read Pollan directly, but I’ve read enough about his ideas to have the gist of it. (Shame on me for not citing primary sources, I know.)
I cede the point that food safety science is much more akin to drug testing – there are not black and whites, people are multivariate creatures, and you have to treat it more like a black box system than rigorous science.
I fully expect opinions to change as we begin to understand and track better long term effects. I’m certain HFCS tests safely in everything evaluated before it hits the market, but long term, we see the prevalence of HFCS in our diet (possibly) causing ill effects.
However, I’ll take some science (with large error bars) over “that’s the way people did it for years”, which strikes me as edging very close to homeopathic herbal remedies. Ginseng root doesn’t improve memory; some chemical or combination of chemicals *in* the root has this effect. Just because something works doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and figure out why it works, then apply that knowledge to improve our lives.
That’s why I support food science, fundamentally. I do think we can and have gone overboard, and a return to close-to-earth practices is warranted and overdue, but I’ll take this imperfect science over nothing.
As to the production, I’d dearly love to see a transition program whereby farmers are given incentives to alter their crop balance. We could have moved whole tobacco crops into something else more useful to us when cigarette companies took their blows. It’s a broken system that has its merits but needs an overhaul.
You really should read some Pollan. His writing isn’t based on “that’s the way people did it for years”. It’s based on a LOT of science. He is very careful to quote vetted studies, and not just random opinion. One of the most interesting was some research on the effects of moving cattle to corn fed over grass fed, and how that throws off the balance of the various omega EFA’s in the human system, and how they can see different effects on human health between grass-fed and grain-fed.
Pollan doesn’t advocate at ALL doing things just based on tradition. He gives very solid reasoning for it, and it all makes a lot of sense. And he doesn’t even advocate a vegetarian/hippie diet, like some might thing he would. Much to my disappointment.
And as Todd suggests, he spends a lot of time talking about thing things that “food science” have done to our diet and health because of that inability to truly test what something will do to the human body over time until we actual do it to the human body. The best example he gives is the whole “butter is bad for you, so eat this margarine crammed with trans fats” debacle. But he talks about others, too.
Amazing, I think Pollan’s approach is pretty moderate and balanced. He is clear that no one can eat a perfect diet. He merely advocates trying to be as aware as we can, and eating food that is nourishing physically AND emotionally. I’m all for that.
MY additional two cents’ worth. Read Pollan, Michael.
And if you want to talk about how “we’ve always done it”, people actually ate healthier when there was no refrigeration or gobs of energy spent bringing us blueberries from Chile (not sure that’s where they come from, but they DO NOT come from either Kentucky or Michigan in March). In Texas you raised your own stuff; in Europe you raised some, and bought stuff at the weekly market (still do). It was of necessity fresh, and raised without pesticides, etc. And you bottled wine and cured meat to eat over the winter. So there.