Anastacia Marx De Salcedo

The attacks on processed foods are apparently generating backlash. In Anastacia Marx de Salcedo’s In Defense of Processed Food, frankenfood is found to be receiving bad press overkill and a generalized undeserved bad rap. She rehabilitates it with worldwide statistics, as well as lots of anecdotal evidence. The result is somewhat less than satisfying.

One of the nice things in the book is the very definition of processed food. There isn’t one. There are so many themes and variations around processed food, it is hard to know where to draw the line. Technically, anything in a bottle, can or box has been processed. From soup and pasta sauce to soda crackers and potato chips, all the way to TV Dinners and plant-based meat, we have taken food far from its natural state. So food writers have been inventing different ways of analyzing and categorizing it. In an effort help clarify this, the book tries to assign levels of processing. And in the process (yes, yes, I know) reveals the extents to which food has been adulterated.

Under minimally processed, we have things like milk, which has been pasteurized, homogenized, irradiated and vitamin D added, for example. Sold as natural, it is still very much a processed food.

Moderately processed means food ingredients are being added, such as sugar, oil, flour and the ever-present salt. Not to mention the evil high fructose corn syrup. This includes flours, fruit juice concentrates and yogurt, for example. The results also include baked goods with their yeast enhancers, emulsifiers, binders, and good old excessive salt.

But ultra-processed is a new world order: “multi-component mixtures of combined ingredients, processed to the extent that they are no longer resemble their basic component foods as found in nature in unprocessed form.” These processes have lately begun to abandon the evil chemical compounds that unreadably extend ingredient lists, in favor of complex factory processes (that require no listing) like grinding into a pulp (including cartilage and gristle), compressing under high pressure plates, injecting water and spices, coloring or frying (to give it a roasted look), then slicing or shaping the resulting mass into something resembling say, sliced meats.

Consumers have known this for years. The old joke is that the cardboard box contains more nutrition than the food inside. Yet processing is becoming more complex and farther removed from raw food all the time. Even if raw food is making statistical headway in supermarkets.

This is how, for example, Pringles potato chips can all come out identically perfect for neat stacking in a cardboard tube, and survive the trip from the factory to the warehouse to the store, to the home. But are they potatoes anymore?

Another helpful section in the book names some chemical compounds banned in the European Union, but not in the USA, despite their cancer connections. These include Azodicabonamide (ADA) used to soften and whiten store-baked breads, Butylated Hydroxyanisole (BHA) and BHT, which enhance flavors to make consumers want ever more, and Brominated Vegetable Oil (BVO) for binding ingredients in flavored sodas and sports drinks. It is these kinds of ingredients that have pushed the likes of Michael Pollan to say that if you can’t read it or never heard of it, it’s not food. And it’s better to just steer clear.

So processed foods are an entrenched part of western life, regardless of where one draws the line. They are inescapable. Which leads de Salcedo to wonder what good drawing a line does at all. If something as basic as milk is a processed food to be avoided, where does that leave us? Must everything just be raw?

But de Salcedo goes much further. She concludes that processed foods are actually a good thing. They have demonstrably reduced the time women spend in the kitchen, for example. And they have not demonstrably reduced life expectancy like say opioids and CovId-19 have. They have fed billions because of their shelf stability and storage potential.

She leaves the world of global research stats and examines the diets of friends of hers. She finds that although they swear by them, and that they are all different, they have made minimal difference, if any. Everyone seems fairly homeostatic on their individualized diets. And processed foods do not tip the scales any farther. Therefore, processed foods are not the problem!

What makes a difference, she says, is running. Yes, running. By running eight or ten miles every day, de Salcedo eats as much junk food as she wants without gaining weight or affecting her blood levels. “I’m extraordinarily healthy for my age, or any age, with a low pulse, good blood pressure and perfect cholesterol,” she says. Good for her. But she of all people should know that anecdotes cannot be generalized to the whole human race. But she goes on, claiming runners “almost never suffer from type 2 diabetes, prediabetes/metabolic syndrome, high cholesterol, high blood pressure and atherosclerosis.” So that’s the answer, then.

If we have learned anything, it is that diets of any kind work, at least for a while. The body realigns to accommodate the diet. That and substantial exercise maintain health, like diet alone cannot. And like exercise alone cannot. In other words, we are still learning and do not have a handle on it for food writers to make such sweeping generalizations.

She also falls for the hokum that a calorie is a calorie, regardless, which is not true. People on vegan diets must often eat a lot more calories just to maintain weight, because calories from greens don’t have the firepower in the body of calories from fat. The China Study showed that ordinary vegetarian diets in rural China required 3300 calories a day, compared to 2400 in the USA, where people still put on weight anyway, while the Chinese remained skinny despite the daily extra calories.

De Salcedo calls herself a public food consultant. Readers might think this means she does massive research and has volumes of facts at her fingertips. The very title of the book. she admits, derives from Michael Pollan’s own book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. But her vast knowledge doesn’t show in this book. It is very much top line only. At just under 120 pages, it is a book on a starvation diet. It might be a good intro for someone who has paid no attention to food whatsoever, but for deeper insight, readers will have to go elsewhere.

David Wineberg… (meer)

This book is a treasure trove of anecdotes about the sometimes unexpected provenance of the staples in our pantries. That the tin can was developed as a response to Napoleon's desire to replace his army's plundering with a more stable form of sustenance is well established. But the military's role, if not in the invention, then in the massive implementation of food sterilization techniques, packaging and esoteric preparation techniques did not stop there.
Most chapters of this book read well, arranged in chronological order and cleverly prefaced with short tableaus of modern family life to outline the ubiquitousness of the products discussed in the book. Unfortunately, their quality is uneven, alterning between well-researched popular science essays and rather confusing strings of anecdotes. Maybe this book is best enjoyed like a packaged Meal, Ready to Eat (MRE): devour the snacks and the more appetizing bits, but skip the soggy sides. Unless you are really hungry.… (meer)

A provocative thesis, but not completely convincing. It's one thing to show a connection between military research and commercial products, and to reveal the origins of certain food techniques and technologies. It's another thing to claim that the military is acting as a shadowy puppeteer with a hidden agenda, and to assert that all of today's processed foods can be traced back to World War I and World War II. (I'm not a food historian, but I find it hard to believe that Nabisco, Kraft, and other corporations that, like the military, probably prize economy, speed and convenience, weren't already working on such products.) And while it was interesting to learn about the biology behind processes like preservation and sterilization, the story tended to get bogged down in such details. Also unnecessary was De Salcedo's patting herself on the back about her own cooking and her role in nurturing her family, which seems more fitting for a memoir.… (meer)