Dear Dad,
Miss you! Hope everything’s going all right at home. I’m writing to you for a class project in my Eating Industrial class. We just finished our first book, Pandora’s Lunchbox, and I think you’d be interested to hear what’s really going into our foods. You know those frozen foods you buy that seem to stay in the freezer for months without going bad? That’s because they’re full of artificial preservatives to keep them “fresh” for many months. These preservatives aren’t natural at all, they’ve been formed together in some food scientist’s lab by smashing pulled apart particles back together in new ways. The food itself has run through many machines to process it and stuff it with fillers. This makes the food more airy and cheaper for a company to produce. Oh, and those chicken nuggets that Sam really loves? Those probably aren’t even chicken, well barely. A lot of chicken nuggets are actually made with soy protein as filler. Originally, soy protein was used for things like paper coating and the foam that is used by firefighters (146). Now, we actually eat that stuff! A really big problem with soy is that soybean oil itself is really difficult to extract from whole soybeans and takes many levels of processing. An even bigger problem is that when it is heated, it activates the formation of chemicals called toxic aldehydes, which have been linked to diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, cancer, and chronic inflammation (137). Soybean oil is used for frying in many fast food restaurants; so maybe next time you go to a drive through after baseball, skip out on the French fries. This also reminds me of a film we watched in class called Food Inc., where a specific poor family’s eating habits were tracked. They seemed to go out for fast food more often than buying groceries because it was cheaper and faster. As a result, the father of the family developed a few heart conditions. His medicine was not cheap either, so now the family has to pay for his medicine AND make more food sacrifices. I am very thankful that you shop at the local grocery stores all the time and make sure that we have plenty of fresh produce at home. Even though our family is always on the go, I’m glad we still find the time to have home-cooked meals. Do you still hear Mom complaining about how she’s “addicted” to potato chips and when she starts eating them she just can’t stop? That’s because most companies consider salt itself a ‘risky’ food additive. Frito Lay actually reduced the amount of sodium in their chips, but this only causes people to eat more because the food has reached its “bliss point”. I learned this from an article by Michael Moss titled The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food. Potato chips have something called a “vanishing caloric density”, which means that something melts in your mouth so quickly that your brain thinks there are no calories in it, so you keep taking more and more handfuls. Do you think the food industry cares about this though? Of course not, why would they still be making Cheetos if they cared how bad the airy orange snack was for the consumer? Try to tell mom to go easy on the chips, and make sure she doesn’t skip breakfast anymore. If she doesn’t eat real meals, she will be more prone to snacking throughout the day. I know how fond our family is of grilled cheese, so I’d hate to ruin it for you, but those Kraft Singles are bad news. You ever wonder why you only have to buy them every few months? How do they even stay fresh in our fridge that long without going bad? It’s cheese! Well, think again, because it isn’t even legally allowed to be called cheese; Kraft must call it “Pasteurized Prepared Cheese Product” (45). To cut costs on production, Kraft substitutes milk protein for most of the actual cheese in their product. This strips the cheese of all of it’s potentially healthy bacteria that it could provide to our bodies to help digestion. Processing cheese this way not only takes away all of the health benefits, but makes it so that those Kraft Singles can last in our fridge for months on end. Maybe we can find a way to make a “real” grilled cheese sometime soon; I know how much you love to cook so this could be fun. We can make sandwiches that aren’t preserved with chemicals such as sorbic acid or sodium benzoate; we can actually call it food too! I hope you don’t take any of this the wrong way; I just wanted to let you know a few things about what we actually eat at home. Maybe we can start to avoid some of the more processed foods, I wouldn’t want anyone’s health to be at risk in our family over something like a Twinkie. Hope to talk to you soon! Love, Rachel
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