I am child of the late 80s and early 90s. Fast food was running full steam ahead, colorful advertising characters for children were everywhere and convenience cooking was becoming the norm. Microwaves were now affordable and the Coca-Cola Company had finally come out with a better tasting diet soda. Officially gone were the days of stay-at-home moms slaving over a hot stove all day cooking a healthy meal for their children. Instead, a new world of overly processed, high fat and sugar substitutes were introduced to working moms who now had kids who made their own breakfasts. If we had only known then what we know now, we would never have let it happen.
While processed foods are plentiful these days, there are some that qualify as just plain scary. I am sure that everyone has read some sort of expose on McDonald’s Frankenstein-like McNugget, made out of some sort of pink gelatinous chicken by-product that cult documentary film director Morgan Spurlock claimed are made of only chickens that are too old to lay eggs anymore. Other than this, most American consumers are still pretty much living and eating in the dark when it comes to overly processed food staples in their diets.
Lists of these “scary foods” are all over the internet. Running down the lists, some of these foods like spray can cheese were obviously overly processed while others were not so much on my radar whenever I travel down the aisles of my local grocery store. Lets start with the most obvious, spray cheese. Known to consumers as “Easy Cheese,” this product does not have to be refrigerated which makes me uneasy to begin with. But, it is mostly made up of canola oil, trisodium phosphate and double the amount of salt in regular cheese. Bottom line, this is not cheese and should be avoided. It is processed food at its best or should I say worst.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, a food that I never really considered to be so overly processed is frozen pizza. If you read the label on a lot of major store brands you will see that there are numerous unhealthy additives added to the product. These additives include: MSG, soy, sugar, hydrogenated oils and tons of other ingredients that I not only cannot pronounce but, also would have to google in order to find out what they are. If you are going to buy frozen pizza, try to find a brand like Amy’s that uses less preservatives and all Organic ingredients. And a good tip if you buy pizza or have it delivered is that a smaller chain restaurant will most likely use healthier ingredients than say a larger chain such as Pizza Hut or Dominos.
Spam, a more obvious processed food has been around since practically the dawn of civilization, or at least as far back as I can remember. Developed in the 1930s, this wartime favorite is made from pork shoulder and enough salt to kill a moose. Part of its appeal throughout the years has to be both its availability in war time as well as its ability to be packaged and shipped with ease. Spam is basically a mound of imitation pork jelly than can be easily manipulated into something more appealing and edible. A friend once told me that her grandmother would prepare fried spam sandwiches for her on Sundays, a true testament to the endearing novelty that processed foods has on older generations, I suppose. But, unlike today in which processed foods are the mainstays of a family's diet, novelty products like Spam were to previous generations just that, novelties. Not something to replace healthier whole foods like real meat, grains, dairy, fresh vegetables and fruits.
If you take the time to really think about what is in the kinds of foods that you were “raised” on, you would be amazed and shocked to discover just how overly processed these products can be. What is the Oreo cream filling actually made of and what additives to they add to the mix that goes into that box of mac and cheese? You will be surprised at how many things are included that you can neither pronounce, spell or let alone know what the heck they are. While the Organic movement is seen by some as either too cultish or unaffordable, past generations made due with far simpler ingredients in their foods and didn’t suffer from it. Whether they realized it at the time or not, they were all active proponents of Organic living. Maybe American society should take a play out of the old school’s playbook and shift back towards those days when food was fresher, healthier, tastier and simpler?
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