Let The Buyer Be Wary

Let The Buyer Be Wary

Today in America we can buy almost any food made and packaged for breakfast, lunch, and supper along with all the snacks we can eat. All we have to do is open the package, sometimes heat the contents and eat. But what are we eating? Perhaps my purchase of a very simple food can illustrate: recently I purchased a package of tortillas. No problem, right? Well, maybe there is a problem.

Tortillas are about as simple a food as one can have to eat. If you make them yourself you only need flour, water, shortening or oil and a touch of baking soda or baking powder and salt (if desired). Not counting the water that is a maximum of four ingredients, right? Trick question. You only need four ingredients if you make it yourself. But then no one is doing any self-making in most kitchens in America these days.

So, how many ingredients do you need if you want your tortillas to be able to sit in a package, on a grocer’s shelf for say, eight weeks (or 8 months if necessary) and still look good enough to eat? Upon reading the ingredients of two different brands the answer is a minimum of nineteen ingredients. So, if four ingredients are necessary to make a tortilla what are the other fifteen ingredients? They are, it seems mostly dough conditioners, preservatives, and miscellaneous chemical additives- so the tortillas look good for a very long time on a shelf. And that count of nineteen does not include the individual names of the vitamins that are added to the mix to make white flour into enriched white flour.

Just what is it that we are eating? In this case, the four ingredients and nearly five times that number of additives, conditioners, and preservatives, so the food does not mold, turn in color or begin to break up when the package is handled for several weeks or months by prospective buyers.

When we purchase the prepared and processed food with its many conditioners, preservatives, and additives we are entering into an agreement with the food producer. What we are saying by buying their food products is that we are willing to eat any chemicals and additives as well as sweeteners they want to put into our food that will preserve their food and make it appear edible for long periods of marketing time and in many cases, make it taste good as well. We are saying that we do not care what else they add to our food supply so long as we can purchase and eat it without any effort on our part in its preparation.

I bought one of those packages of tortillas and took a single tortilla out of the package for a taste test. Didn’t really taste like a home-made tortilla so, re-sealed the wrapper and left the entire package in the frig for a full six months. And what do you suppose the tortillas looked like after all that time? Perfect! Not a spot of mold. No dried edges or discoloring. No signs at all that this ‘food’ product was half a year old. I even felt a tad guilty when I dumped the package in the garbage, it seemed as if I was wasting real food.

And we consumers choke down similarly processed foods many times each day. So long as they require little or no preparation and taste good, little else matters, right? But, after we have consumed fifteen to twenty of those chemically altered foods a week for say, 25-35 years or so, we may develop cancer or any number of other chronic inflammatory illnesses. And then where is the blame placed- high-fat diets, of course- it is so simple and believable that the average citizen need look no further.

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