processed food

[kengr]

I see people complaining that we don't eat "real food" just "food-like substances", Or that modern foods are overprocessed.

Well, let me point out a few staple foods in some parts of the world:

Manioc. It's extracted from a root that gets mashed to a pulp, and then the pulp rinsed thouroughly with water until the water runs off clear. Note that the milky liquid that runs off is used to poison fish to harvest them. Anyway, the pulp gets the excess water pressed out and is cooked up as a sort of flatbread.

Sago. You pulp the core of the sago palm tree and rinse it out, much like you do with manioc. And you cook it much the same.

Tapioca is yet another staple food that is extracted after similar processing.

These are just the first examples of foods that get processed fairly extensively to get something edible (and bland!).

Processing food goes *way* back. And it's sometimes fairly extensive. Modern food may be processed, but even if it's more processed, it's the continuation of an ancient practice.

Cheetos aren't *that* much more processed than manioc or sago,. Velveeta? Well ok, some things are beyond the pale.

But even there, take a good look at how cheese is made.

Comments

[seawasp]

Cheese: You basically heat up milk, in the classic approach you then add a piece of a calf's stomach to it, you then strain out the curdled blobs that remain,and then depending on what kind of cheese you want you may leave it to rot (in a controlled fashion of course!) for years!

Yogurt: Don't bother with the fancy tricks,just let it rot (in a controlled fashion)

Lutefisk: First, dry your fish to a bone-like consistency. Then soak it for 5-6 days in water. Then soak it for a couple of days in lye (yes, that stuff used for soapmaking and drain-opening. Then soak it to get rid of the lye. THEN cook it.

Yeah, we've got processed foods from ancient times.

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

Then there's things like jerking, smoking, salting, jugging... Before modern food processing most foods required some extreme treatment to last through the Winter. Preparing even fresh foods for eating could take literally days.

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

Velveeta is made from real cheese. It is just hyper-processed cheese.

[kengr]

Hominy is corn processed with lye. :-)

[kengr]

If it's not Velveeta, it's some other "cheese". Which is actually made from various oils/fats.

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

Or kimchi, which is put into a barrel and buried for a certain amount of time to ferment. Or alcohol, or a dozen other things.

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

Oh, like Kraft singles?