Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, should be on your must read list for this fall/winter. He discusses the intrusion of "edible foodlike substances in our supermarkets", processed foods, that have displaced our whole fresh foods of the past. Pollan gives the background on how and why our markets today are filled with junk food and processed foods that have been re-engineered to look like health foods.
His sense of humor and seriousness collide when at one point he writes "Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food...What would shopping this way mean in the supermarket? Well, imagine your great grandmother at your side as you roll down the aisles. You're standing together in front of the dairy case. She picks up a package of Go-Gurt Portable Yogurt tubes--and has no idea what this could possibly be. Is is a food or a toothpaste? And how, exactly, do you introduce it into your body? You could tell her it's just yogurt in a squirtable form, yet if she read the ingredients label she would have every reason to doubt that that was in fact the case. Sure, there's some yogurt in there, but there are also a dozen other things that aren't remotely yogurtlike, ingredients she would probably fail to recognize as foods of any kind, including high-fructose corn syrup, modified corn starch, kosher gelatin, carrageenan, tricalcium phosphate, natural and artificial flavors, vitamins, and so forth...how did yogurt, which in you great grandmother's day consisted simply of milk inoculated with a bacterial culture, ever get so complicated?" (P. 148-149)
The other day, I did a risky thing. I picked up a bag of shredded cheddar cheese, turned it over and read the ingredients. Pre-grated cheddar cheese, simple enough, but probably not available to my mother, much less my grandmother. What I read reinforced what Pollan has written about. "Ingredients: Cultured pasteurized milk, salt, enzymes, artificial color, potato starch and powdered cellulose added to prevent caking, natamycin (a natural mold inhibitor)." I quickly grabbed some other brands, hoping this was not the norm. Unfortunately, it was. Powdered cellulose???
Now, if you think that you have to have the "ready to use" product, be it grated cheese or the condensed soup we all grew up with, as additives to our meals or dishes, because it saves us so much time or so much money, Pollan says, "We can say we can't afford to pay more for food, either in money or time or both...just in the last decade or two, we've somehow found the time in the day to spend several hours on the internet and the money in the budget not only to pay for broadband service, but to cover a second phone bill and a new monthly bill for television, formerly free." (P. 187)
You know from previous posts that I am a cookbook junkie. I have to tell you though, that I am finding a great deal of solace in my grandmother's cookbooks. They are amazingly pure in using whole foods.
