As a child spending lots of time at my grandmother’s house, I learned a ton about growing foods and preserving them. My grandmother had her own greenhouse and she taught me how to process food, though we used different methods from those utilized by many of the big food manufacturers.
People have been processing foods in order to make them last longer since before recorded history began. Back then, it was a matter of survival; they froze, dried, or salted their meat and vegetables and kept roots in cool, dry places.
People still process and preserve their own foods at home today, though their methods are more sophisticated. As a child, I learned a lot about growing, preserving, and preparing foods, including processing and canning fruits and vegetables, blanching and freezing vegetables, and processing meat in a pressure canner or just freezing it. There are lots of food preservation methods that you can undertake right in your own home.
In essence, I was learning to do the same things that large corporations do in order to make their food last longer on the shelf. However, the methods that we used to process our foods were healthier than those used by corporations, even though we used a little salt and sugar.
Since we know that it’s possible to process foods and still keep them healthy, why are there so many additives in the food at the grocery store today? They do make the food last longer, but it doesn’t seem like a very good deal to trade our health so that our food can have a longer shelf life.
My feeling is that corporations add these things to our food because they make it taste better. For example, they know that our taste buds love salt, so they add it to our foods to make us more likely to keep coming back for more. Now that we’ve all been eating foods high in sodium for so long, we expect that saltiness in all our food.
Food without salt just doesn’t taste as good to us. Fat and sugar are also added to many foods, with similar effect on our food preferences.
All hope isn’t lost for healthy food, though. Many food producers have come under fire for their unhealthy products and there has been a move toward more natural and healthy preparation methods. This is an admirable move on the part of the producers, and we can only hope that more of them follow suit.
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