Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Potato chips, refi ned sugar, margarine, soft drinks, corned beef hash,
pop tarts, and spam are not food, naturally occurring unprocessed edible
products. White bread, farmed fi sh, and cattle from feedlots are not real
food. Most processed “foods” are not food—Cheerios, salami, nondairy
coffee whitener, commercial pancake fl our, bacon, and the myriad of
other edible supermarket products that your grandmother would not
recognize. Americans spend about 90 percent of their food budget on
processed foods.
The food humans evolved with—fruits, vegetables, and animals that
forage their entire lives—are today only a minor part of the human diet.
Advertising is designed to sell processed products, not real food. Only
those regarded by many people as food faddists push organic tomatoes,
spinach, or raspberries, and their scattered voices are drowned out by
mass market merchants and nutritionists.
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America is addicted to fast
foods and junk foods. People eat to fi ll their bellies and entertain their
tongues, not to nourish their minds and bodies. Food has deteriorated
from something that nourishes the body to a chemically altered sensory
addition fabricated in a factory.
Americans read about nutrients, not food. The common words Ameri-
cans are besieged with that are related to eating are not
carrots, pears,
and
rice,
but chemical terms such as
good
and
bad cholesterol, low fat,
antioxidants, triglycerides, carbohydrates, fatty acids, free radicals,
and
other terms that only a chemist could defi ne. To these chemical terms
are added pseudochemical words devised by advertisers such as
probiotic
(contains live micro-organisms) and
biofl avinoids
(plant metabolites). As
Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock has noted, “Advertising may be
described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough
to get money from it.”
Ethics
is apparently not a word in the vocabulary of companies'
advertising arms. They are deliberately deceptive, and their only aim is
to entice consumers into purchasing their products. Terms such as “Heart
Healthy,” “A Better Choice,” and “Good for You” appear on products
that are often none of these things.
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In late August 2009, a consortium
of major processed food makers initiated its Smart Choices Program that
they claimed was “designed to help shoppers easily identify smarter food
and beverage choices.” A few months later, after a public outcry, the
FDA announced the labeling might be “misleading” and said it intended
to investigate. Three of the four companies subsequently pulled out of
the Smart Choices campaign.
