It
can be hard to know where to draw the line, but Peeps are definitely past it.
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| Peeps take a beating in this week's Jill Richardson food column |
If you’ve read any nutritional advice lately, you’ve probably
encountered one hard-and-fast rule: Avoid processed foods.
But what does “processed” mean?
On one level, anything humans do to food — slicing fruit,
cooking beans, fermenting cabbage into sauerkraut — constitutes processing.
It’s obviously silly to say that an apple eaten whole is healthy, while the
same apple sliced isn’t.
And even if you can call the ingredients “processed,” there’s
nothing unhealthy about a good, crusty sourdough bread made with whole wheat
flour or cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil. Why should a diet forbid them?
Another school of thought says that if cooking and chopping are
benign and even healthful, then any other form of processing is good, too.
But what rational person would say that a roasted chicken is nutritionally
equivalent to a Chicken McNugget?
Here’s what you really need to avoid: ultra-processed fare. Ultra-processed foods are made
with ingredients not normally found in a household kitchen, such as artificial
flavors, colors, and emulsifiers.
A recent study found that over half of the calories
Americans eat come from these ultra-processed foods. Yet some of the confusion
over the difference may lead to calls for people to avoid all processed foods.
For example, a fruit salad is an undeniably healthy snack. But
if you didn’t make it yourself, it may have been treated with a preservative.
Likewise, humans have eaten oils for millennia. But they’ve only
recently begun extracting it with solvents like hexane. If you buy a bottle of
vegetable oil at the store — or a dish fried in a vat of oil at a restaurant —
do you know what you’re getting?
It can be hard to know where to draw the line. And it’s getting
more difficult as ultra-processed foods warp people’s taste buds.
Food journalist Mark Schatzker, author of The Dorito Effect: The Surprising
New Truth About Food and Flavor, made another prescient observation: As ultra-processed
foods become ever more irresistible, some of the better alternatives have
become less tasty.
It’s true. Factory farms have bred broiler chickens to grow to
maturity at five weeks, before they develop flavor. And vegetable shippers have
selected tomatoes that are big, red, round, and ship well — but taste like
styrofoam. Can you blame eaters for turning away from them?
We don’t need restrictive regimens banning us from cooking,
slicing, steaming, and fermenting to shape up our diets. And you don’t have to
buy everything you eat at farmers’ markets or grow it yourself, as tasty as
that might be.
But it’s safe to say that cutting back on Twinkies, Peeps,
Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, Easy Mac, and other ultra-processed foods will do the
trick.
OtherWords
columnist Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe for America: Why
Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. OtherWords.org.
