Processed Food Industry

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What's really being processed? Anyone living and eating in the modern world, and paying even a little attention, knows that we are a very long way from eating food, not too much, mostly plants. Not only does our food come mostly in bags, boxes, bottles, jars and cans -- but mostly, it isn't really food. It's food stuff. It doesn't come from an animal or plant; it's made in a plant. It rolls off an assembly line. That seems a bit ominous on its own, but of course the plot is much thicker than that. As told recently by Michael Moss, that food is not processed haphazardly -- it's processed to very clear specifications. It's processed to be addictive. We may have thought "betcha' can't eat just one!" was a clever marketing slogan, but it's clearly been much more than that for years. It was a performance measure for Big Food's R&D departments. If we could only eat just one, somebody probably lost their job. This story has been out there for years. But even as we were hearing about it, we just kept succumbing to it -- as did our kids. And the result is that fully a third of the calories in the typical American diet come from... junk. For our kids, it may be as much as half. We are buying junk. We are eating junk. We are feeding our children... junk! It's almost unbelievable. Of course we love our children and grandchildren. But we all look on passively as they derive construction material for those precious bodies from... junk. Are we really supposed to be OK with this? What it all really means is that we have long since left the era of processed food in the rearview mirror of cultural inertia. We are now well into the realm of processing... people. We are processing you, and me. We are processing our kids. How else could the notion that "junk" -- which would not be suitable to build a home, make a dress, fuel a car -- is a legitimate food group ever have been
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