An email to my significant other who attends Grand Valley State University
Hey Sean,
I’m here to nag you about your eating habits again but this time in an email with facts to back me up! Just to clarify, this is a mini project for that book I read that you hate. That book is Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal by Melanie Warner. This time, instead of hating on my book, maybe you can hate on the junk food you love to eat. From this book, I have learned that many of the foods in your apartment kitchen are, in a word, bad. Those ready-to-eat foods like your frozen pizzas, white bread, cereal and what looks like a year supply of pop tarts have unknown consequences that come with each bite. I feel it’s important to share with you exactly what you’re putting in your body. Let’s talk about two foods you eat a lot of and that I have learned a lot about, cereal and white bread.
I’ll start with your cereal. Your favorite brand is Pops, but what actually is behind those little yellow puffs? Warner has a whole chapter dedicated to the breakfast food so many of us eat every morning. What she writes is unexpected in the worst of ways. I learned that all the nutrients found in cereal are not from the ingredients that make cereal. Nowadays, our cereal goes through the process of extrusion. Extrusion is a practice that uses brutal machines to mix the ingredients of cereal in a way that Warner describes as “undoubtedly the harshest and most nutritionally devastating way to process cereal” (62). I’m sure you’re wondering why your Pops say they have Vitamin A, C and iron. These nutrients are added after the cereal’s creation so that there is some nutritional appeal to the product. These added nutrients don’t do much to benefit you. Scientists have found that “foods nutritional story has a lot more to it than just vitamins, minerals, protein and carbohydrates” (90). In other words, just adding vitamin A and C and iron to food is not nearly as beneficial as receiving those nutrients from a natural source. The reason I’m ruining cereal for you is because it’s a deceptive food. I know I’ve been guilty of thinking that I started mornings right with a bowl of cereal. Why wouldn’t I? Cereal has often been touted as a fundamental breakfast food that’s packed with essential nutrients and vitamins to get Americans through the day. The food companies won’t tell us the truth behind processed foods, so we have to uncover it ourselves. The truth of the matter is cereal, like a vast majority of processed foods, is an empty food that you and I would be much better off without.
I’ll move on to my next topic, white bread. It’s common knowledge that white bread is bad for you, but I want to give you more insight as to what exactly is bad about it. To make white bread similar in appearance, shape and taste it gets additives such as azodicarbonamide. This additive makes your bread look nice but also is a hazardous material that has been known to cause skin irritation and burning eyes. Similarly to cereal, Warner mentions that white bread is created by beating the ingredients to death, removing the product of any nutritional value. This highly processed food can also lead to weight gain. According to Warner, 5 to 15 percent of all calories we use throughout the day are expended on food digestion and “hyperproccessed food requires considerably fewer calories to assimilate” (66). It’s common knowledge that white bread is unhealthy, but not many people know exactly why it’s unhealthy. The truth behind what makes white bread undesirable, at least in my opinion, makes it far more off-putting. The food industry doesn’t want people to know what really is beneath their product’s wrappers. This is not just the case for cereals and white bread. Almost all processed foods have similar shady additives and detrimental health effects that are kept hush-hush. We as a society can’t continue to believe that just because a food is edible it is okay to put into our bodies.
Warner’s book gives more reasons why essentially all processed foods are harmful, but I choose to talk about white bread and cereal because those are vital foods in your diet. By giving you a taste of what exactly it is that makes your processed foods bad, I hope I taught you what Warner taught me. Warner used little known, shocking facts about processed food to enforce how terrible almost all processed foods are. I’m sure you’re wondering, how can I avoid processed foods? Fortunately, Warner’s book isn’t just 222 pages of processed food bashing. She gives us a way out of the processed food cycle. The first step is to not engage in it. It is our choice to buy processed foods and our responsibility to stop buying them. It is not the food industry’s job to make ultra-healthy snacks for us and we shouldn’t expect them to. The final step to the solution is cooking. I can feel your objections already but, as Warner points out, cooking is almost always cheaper and more nutritious than buying processed foods. Not only would you be saving money, you would also be improving your diet. You’ve been given the opportunity to make use of this solution since you have a kitchen on campus. Your only excuse for not cooking would be a lack of desire to cook. I promise cooking doesn’t have to be a chore! In fact from another reading in class, several studies were conducted that asked home bound housewives of the 50’s their opinion on cooking. It found that 95% of them thought of cooking as a positive experience. Not that you are in anyway a housewife! I’m just saying that people who used to do a lot of home cooking really enjoyed it and you can too. Plus there are plenty of blogs out there with simple recipes that take minutes if the time it takes to cook is what turns you off to the idea.
I know the staples of your diet are cheap and taste good, but real foods taste just as good, are better for your overall health and can even be cheaper. I hope I could make you rethink at least one of the processed products in your kitchen. I’ll try to nag you about your food less now.