Micheal Pollan in the book, In Defense of Food compares today's meals to those of one your grandma might have cooked. Nutritionism has changed what a meal looks like for a normal supper or dinner might look like. The main change is how the meal is prepared and how it is processed before it is sold. In your grandma's day, she would have probably prepared a meal for your family from scratch in her own kitchen. In contrast, today, many meals, especially fast food industry, are being prepared from processed meats and other products. I decided to prepare a meal, which I felt was more of a "grandma" meal.
The meal I choose to cook was a combination of biscuits and mashed potatoes. The ingrediants I purchased were from Carson's Carryout and Copps grocery store. To make the potatoes, I purchased two pounds of potatoes, one cup of half and half, 3 tablespoons of butter, salt and pepper. Using a recipe, I found on the internet, I cut and peeled the potatoes up and then cooked them. After adding salt, I cooked them until they were soft and then drained the water. I then set the stove on low heat while mashing them and adding the butter and the half and half.
To make the biscuits, I got two cups of sifted flour, two teaspoon of baking powder, four table spoons of butter, 1/2 of teaspoon of salt, and 3/4 of cup of milk. The first step of making the biscuits was to sift through the flour then add the baking powder and salt and sifted again. Add butter by mixing it in the flour and then add milk to soften the flour. I kneaded the dough into round shapes and cooked them for 12 minutes at 400 degrees. In the end, the potatoes turned out good, but the biscuits were very crumbly.
I believe that processed foods are not as bad as Pollan would make you believe, but do have a negative side. Preservatives can be hard on the digestive track. The meal I created made me feel like we may not need foods from preservatives, which could be unhealthier. However, I can see why people enjoy processed foods because it took a long time to make the meal from scratch, when I could have just popped something into the microwave. The article of "U.S.A.=Fast Food Nation," which can be found at http://www.puristat.com/standardamericandiet/processedfoods.aspx, agrees with me that preservatives in processed foods can be damaging by causing asthma, nausau, and vomiting. Overall, homecooked meals are probably more healthy for you, due to the lack of preservatives.
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Andrew has very valid points throughout his blog. I agree home cooked meals do taste better and are healthier, but not just because they lack preservatives. Preservatives do exactly what they say they do, they preserve food. This makes the breaking down of food much harder which in turn makes the amount of nutrients absorbed by the body less. We can also link our “western” diet, as Pollan calls it, unhealthy because everything in our diet is bigger. If your food does not have enough flavors, add salt. Put butter on your veggies, bread, and potatoes.
ReplyDeleteEven if we eat home cooked meals we need to limit the excess additives and also cut down on our portions. Pollan points this out in his book, by saying something along the lines of, we do not eat out of necessity, we eat to socialize or to get a certain feeling from our food. As a society I believe we should only eat out of necessity. If we do so I believe we can be healthier as a nation and cut down on diseases that have popped up such as obesity and a rise in high blood pressure. If we look back at times where we ate natural, unprocessed foods we see that as a whole we were much healthier. http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/reprint/7/1/91.pdf. This pdf file shows how our diets have been growing over the last one hundred plus years. This increase has been directly related to rise in certain diseases. So I believe our bigger is better mentality needs to turn to just enough is great too mentality.