Carefully Choosing the Right Food to Eat

 As a child, I spent many days at my grandmother’s house. As she operated a greenhouse, I learned quite a bit from her about the preservation of foods and about plants in general. I learned to process food, though in a distinct home-grown way.

Processed foods are not a new phenomenon. They’ve been around since before our recorded history begins. People had to preserve food simply to survive. They salted their foods so that they would last longer. They also dried or froze their meat and vegetables and stored roots in dry, cool areas. For these people, making food last longer was necessary for survival.

Today, not all food processing is done by manufacturers. Many people process foods in their homes simply to preserve them, although the methods are more advanced than they were in prehistory. Growing up, I learned to not only grow foods but to prepare and process them as well. I learned to can fruits and vegetables, blanche and freeze vegetables, and freeze or process meat in a pressure canner to keep it from spoiling.

In essence, I was learning to do the same things that large corporations do in order to make their food last longer on the shelf. However, the methods that we used to process our foods were healthier than those used by corporations, even though we used a little salt and sugar.

Why have food producers taken to putting so many additives in their foods when it’s still possible to process food using healthy methods? These additives do make the food last longer, but is it really worth it? We may be losing years off our lives just by consuming foods that have been processed to last longer.

I feel that corporations have added some of these substances to improve the taste of their foods and keep us buying them. Many foods have large amounts of salt added, which enhances the flavors of the food. So many of the foods we consume on a daily basis have added salt that we’re now accustomed to the extra sodium.

If we try to eat a food that doesn’t have added salt, we often find it bland. Fat and sugar have also been added to many foods, with a similar effect on our taste preferences.

All hope isn’t lost for healthy food, though. Many food producers have come under fire for their unhealthy products and there has been a move toward more natural and healthy preparation methods. This is an admirable move on the part of the producers, and we can only hope that more of them follow suit.