I’ll go ahead and admit it right away. I’m considered a food processor.
As a graduate student in food engineering and a food scientist grad via my bachelor’s degree, I’ve had substantial opportunity to make some well-informed observations about what drives food processing.
I should note that I’m not here to bash fear-mongering anti-food-processing propaganda. I’m merely here to give the other view, based on my pursuit of a second degree in the area.
Food processing serves several purposes, such as safety, convenience and preservation. It’s no surprise that the average consumer has become driven toward convenience with respect to food consumption. It seems like there is a new fast food restaurant under construction or an eat-on-the-go product hitting the shelves every time you turn around.
It is uncommon to find families that are entirely self-sufficient, meaning they produce everything they eat. Most people are working 9-to-5 jobs with plenty of other obligations to fulfill in their personal lives. These are the people who want food with minimal preparation that will last for weeks or months. There just isn’t always time to cook or go to the grocery store.
Instead of buying fresh fruits and vegetables, meats and grains, which can be cooked into a healthy dinner, time-pressed consumers are driven toward TV dinners. Then, when consumers read the ingredient list on the TV dinners, they find that there is a long list of chemical names that they are unfamiliar with.
Inevitably, the ingredients will be Googled and the consumer will probably find out that they are used in industrial processes, and when consumed in extremely large amounts, they may be harmful to health.
This then starts the aforementioned fear-mongering.
In reality, the food industry is not out to kill off consumers by adding poisons to foods. The ingredients may be lethal at high doses; however, in small amounts, there is likely no negative effect on the body.
Even water can be lethal if too much is consumed. Every ingredient and processing step costs processors extra money, and no profit-driven food processor is going to survive by throwing away money by adding ingredients that don’t serve a purpose.
A great example of this is the grated cheese you get in bags. To keep the cheese from clumping, an anti-caking agent, calcium sulfate is added. Calcium sulfate has not been proven to be dangerous in small amounts, but it is a food additive that many consumers have problems accepting.
It is quite easy to avoid, though! It is as simple as buying a block of cheese and grating it yourself at home. Processors would surely profit from cutting out adding additional ingredients and processing steps required to make pre-shredded cheese.
These are just a few examples of many concepts in the food industry that have been misconstrued.
The take-home message here is that eating is your decision, not the food industry’s. You don’t have to agree with everything the food industry does, and you don’t have to eat all of its products. It just comes down to consumer education and bringing food preparation back to the kitchen.
