Stop Worrying, and Learn to Love Industrial Food

See We Shouldn’t Want to Eat Like Our Great-Great-Grandparents by Dr. Dutkiewicz and Dr. Rosenberg are the authors of the forthcoming book “Feed the People: Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make It Even Better.” From The NY Times. Excerpts:

"But before you hurl that bagel into the trash, consider that it represents much that is good about our food system: It is affordable, convenient and nutritious. Virtually all the food we eat, junk and vegetables alike, is part of an industrial system. Acknowledging that fact and embracing the system’s scale, reliability, safety standards and abundance is a far better path to improving it than chasing a fantasy of Edenic premodern food that never existed.

Your morning bagel is, in fact, a small miracle made possible by conventional, mass-produced and enriched ingredients, like flour and salt. At the turn of the 20th century, when our great-great-grandparents had no choice but to eat “real food,” malnutrition was rampant. Anemia was common, as was iodine deficiency, which could cause a disfiguring swelling of the thyroid gland known as a goiter; in one Michigan county on the eve of World War I, nearly a third of potential Army recruits were rejected because of such thyroid problems. Enrichment — such as the addition of iron to wheat flour and iodine to salt — and easier access to grain and fresh produce, made possible by productive industrial farming, reduced anemia and virtually banished not only goiters but also illnesses like rickets, scurvy and pellagra.

Perhaps you want a slice of tomato on that bagel? If it’s January on the East Coast, it won’t be local. Your tomato will come from Florida or, more likely, Mexico, where it will have been grown on high-yield farms using conventional fertilizers and pesticides. Want it organic? It will still take industrial supply chains to get it to you. Shunning those globe-spanning supply chains in favor of sparse and often more expensive local and seasonal alternatives is likely to result in everyone eating less produce.

Adding fruit will make your breakfast even healthier. Here, too, modern food technology can help. Half a century of worry about the safety of genetically modified organisms, or G.M.O.s, often derided as “frankenfoods,” has not yielded a shred of compelling evidence that they endanger human health. The genetically modified Rainbow papaya, which is resistant to the ringspot virus, saved Hawaii’s papaya crop. Arctic apples from Washington State, genetically modified to brown more slowly, reduce food waste."

"the idea that ultraprocessed foods are categorically unhealthy is an oversimplification." 

"many ultraprocessed foods, such as yogurt, whole-grain bread or ready-to-eat plant-based burgers, are not linked to worse health outcomes and may even be beneficial."

"dumping industrial food from your plate would do little to change things for the better and, in some cases, would actually make it worse. Food that is local, organic and low-tech is vastly more expensive than food grown through conventional methods. There is little evidence that it is healthier. And when it comes to environmental impact, it matters much more what is produced than how it is produced; tofu is going to have a smaller ecological footprint than beef. That holds true even if the tofu comes from soybeans grown on giant farms using pesticides, and the beef is grass-fed and organic."

"There are plenty of premade options you can grab that are just as nutritious as the fresh-cooked version, like Starbucks egg white bites, Trader Joe’s palak paneer or frozen microwavable vegetables."