If you are good children I will not take you home and cook you a healthy meal made from nutritious ingredients I have carefully selected from trusted sources, I will not give you organic produce, I will not pour you clean water or offer an unmolested fruit juice or tea. Instead I will take you to a vendor that will supply you and I with a low nutrient content meal of a chicken that has, in its very short and rather miserable life, been saturated in steroids and antibiotics, kept in a cage, and force fed so as to grow at an accelerated unnatural pace to a size it should never be, then smothered in breadcrumbs that are saturated in MSG so that the chemical reaction you receive will make your brain think you have enjoyed it. This meal will be served with a single version of one chipped potato that’s production, for the sake of consistency and nothing else, has caused devastating ecological consequences for the regions it is grown in because it is well known that farming the same land multiple times strains it to uselessness. To compensate a grand amount of petrochemicals must be used, and to ensure a high yield a lot of pesticides and herbicides will also be employed. As this potato is favoured it will become a favoured crop, not just over other spuds, and much land may be cleared to make way for it. The farmer will likely kill anything that might threaten this crop, like the stuff that would naturally reside there, but farmers do this with every crop anyway.
Keep in mind, apparently this is a treat….
Good food is good for you, its primary purpose is to fuel the body, not to taste good (but of course that helps, and evolution is no stranger to developing things that are attractive). The process of selection, preparation, and presentation makes food tastier in the right hands. The chef may perform some tricks on the food to unlock the potential to please you the eater, but it is the ingredients inherent value that makes it nutritious. When the ingredients are less than optimal some advanced chemistry has to be used to make your taste buds think they have received something of value. MSG is probably the most well known additive that does this, but there are many others.
Good food rots quickly, this is because it is nutritious and therefore of value to the bacteria that start the composting process. That might be a bit of an annoyance to us the shopper. To make it last longer than it ordinarily would it has to be treated using processes that will necessarily make it less attractive to that which would eat it, bacteria. We have other methods… remove the ability of bacteria to eat it in removing the bacteria by tinning the food and heating the bacteria to death (new bacteria cannot then enter the can and access the food so it becomes sterile), or cooling the item to slow the rotting process, or drying in some way to remove the moisture the little fuckers need to operate (bacteria requires moisture) and then just rehydrating the item when needed. The natural speed of the rotting process indicates the nutritional value, that means it is to be valued that it will rot quickly, that means it is simply better than the equivalent that does not. Peel a potato and it starts to turn from white to yellow, buy a loaf of processed bread and make some bread on the same day, the one you made will rot maybe a week before the purchased item. Some of this rotting we use to our advantage, cheese for instance, the bacteria there makes it tasty but instead of calling it bacterial growth we use the more palatable term “aged”.
Tastes change, you taught yourself to like some food and beverage items that you started out not liking, no kid likes beer or olives or marmite, but then you might as an adult. You can teach yourself to do without any food, regardless of how much you think it rewards you. The reward you get from eating fast food has been created in a laboratory by some very smart chemists, the synapses that fire when you get carbs are over-revved by additives that serve no purpose but to fool your brain, the speed at which you convert the energy is accelerated so you get hungry again quicker than you should, the meal has so much salt added into it that you are thirsty and likely to purchase a beverage in addition. Some food is even designed (yes designed, a lot of things in the category of “food” are products we made) to make you hungrier, like snacks or chewing gum, crisps will make you want and consume more crisps, and no matter how many crisps you eat it is impossible to become full. Sickened into eating no more is the best you could hope for.
Some foods contain huge amounts of energy, this is because they are the nutrition source for the plant they are going to grow, or they are in the chain of repetitive breeding and may have to be strong enough to compete to procreate, and every organism wishes to grow another. We release the energy of theses foods, sometimes by simply eating them and other times through the chemistry of cooking or curing. When we have to cook something before we eat it we are encountering a food that we could not naturally eat in its raw state. We cannot eat a potato straight from the ground or take a bite out of a live chicken. We change the food through process, but this is different than adding to it in the way food companies do, we are making it available, they are making it last longer or be more artificially attractive. When they are not doing this they are adding false weight to increase the price per Kg at sale, the water they add will quickly disappear as the product is cooked.
We need only the energy we need to do the work we need to do and not a calorie more. Take more than you need and your body will store it for later in the form of fat. This is an evolutionary process, a throwback from when such energy was scarce and we found it much harder to source and release, a mechanism to store excess in case you might not find food for a few days, but it still applies to people who eat meals up to five times a day many thousands of years later. Fats do not make you fat, protein and fibre do not either, though these types will have an effect on how your body works in slowing down some processes and speeding some others. Protein is the most valuable energy source to the body, it allows the building of muscle and strength, yet it is extremely volatile and only lasts a few hours. Carbohydrates are the reason of your love handles, bingo wings, and why you can’t get into those jeans. Protein is the thing that is most easily destroyed in the processing phase, some foods that would have contained it actually end up with none when they are ultra processed (UPF).
Sweetness is an indication of immediately accessible energy, but it is an evolutionary imperative that is no longer necessary. The more you get the less sweet things seem, to the point where you can hardly retrieve it. But go without it for a while and suddenly everything starts to taste sweet. Fibre is a component that helps you pass, flush out, materials that you need to dispose of, but too much and you can have trouble passing and end up with other issues from the effort. Too little fibre and you’re headed for the runny stuff. Mint helps you get rid of wind, hence why as you get older you’re more likely to have it in the house. Ginger helps to relieve nausea when you’ve eaten something that has upset you. You won’t heed much of this when you are young because you cope better, but the one thing you cannot cope with is the over-intake of energy, do that and you will increase in size, it has to go somewhere. If you exercise enough you can get rid of a lot, maybe all, stored energy. Use it or carry it!
Proteins and fats keep you from being hungry, eating slowly makes you realise you’ve had enough more quickly so you stop, fasting makes your body stop storing fat, staying hydrated stops you from being water-hungry. Discipline is the key, know what is good for you and what is merely for the taste of it, know what is food and what is not. I suppose it’s hard to stay away from those things that give immediate reward but to have them frequently is habitual not a taste treat because the taste will diminish. The heat of chilli peppers diminishes, a tolerance is built up and their effect wanes. If you have a pudding after lunch and one after dinner, and you snack in between, then you are not having a treat, you are replacing real food with junk that does not fill or nourish, that’s why you’re still hungry after and reaching for more.
Oils play a role, the natural ones, the king of this being the olive version in use for thousands of years where the olive grows, you can even drink the good stuff like a fine wine. Seed oils have been linked to inflammation by some nutritionists, and rapeseed is the worst of them apparently. This is from a weed, not favoured as a cooking product until recently, and historically more frequently used in the automotive industry, or as a biofuel. Rapeseed is only a choice because it grows here and olives don’t, and it’s use is thought by some to be economic not nutritional. Science can make an oil out of anything now, and it will. Science will also make a milk where it can, and a lot of these have no nutrition at all, they are just a white fluid sometimes with sweeteners added. Milk works better as milk than alternatives with the nominal title, and again we have been using it since before the earliest civilisations. People fool themselves that the fat within it will make them fat, this is bullshit, and the perceived benefits of the skimmed version are very likely a hoodwink.
“They do really big portions”, I’ve heard this a few times. This isn’t an indication of value, it sounds like it is but it’s the opposite. If you operate your business the same way your competitors do theirs, and you sell the same products, then you are not going to willingly give greater value and get lower profits than they are. There’s only one place this extra can come from if in a competitive market, and that is quality. Higher quality food costs more because higher quality food requires more effort and resource and energy. Sometimes we are fooled into thinking it is the ability of the chef that dictates, but the better chefs get access to a more willing to pay higher prices, and more demanding, customer, so they can afford, and are mandated, to buy better produce. Obviously this is a simplification of a commercial model that is much more complex, but it still holds true at any scale.
Back to the proposed treat. Your children may want the sweets or the fast food, but you are treating their today by maybe doing them a disservice long term. You could make bad nutrition habitual, you could sow the seeds of a lifetime of immediate pleasure from calories becoming a way of feeling good after a tough time, you may put food in the place of solving a problem, you may cause food to become a disorder or a compensation, you may create a future where food is the wrong solution. Has this already happened to you, maybe it happened to me too or somebody I know? Conversely you might choose to take the youngsters home and feed them very well and teach them that it is what’s best, but then are you are robbing their greater pleasure today potentially for the sake of their health tomorrow and beyond? Your choice.
I am not a nutritionist, it’s important to state that fact. All of the above speculation is merely that, and offered in good faith. If it is wrong then I am wrong, entirely or partially, but, as ever, I am perfectly willing to be…. argue with me..
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