More Preserves, Please!
by tristero
“More preserves please”: That’s what I originally thought Kevin Drum meant in this headline, and I was looking forward to learning something about canning, which I’m very interested in. But nooo… He sends us here, to a defense of BHA and BHT.
For the record let me state that given the existing food supply system in the United States, I completely agree that BHA and BHT are terribly important to protect the public’s health.
And that, dear friends, is the reason why – once I learned how our food is manufactured – I have done everything in my power to sever as many ties as I can between the American industrial food system and my family.
Perhaps I should explain. It’s actually quite simple.
All I want is a delicious meal. But the main focus of American food factories is to manufacture stuff that’s easy for them to make, store, distribute, and sell. Beyond that, they’re primarily interested in preventing their consumers from getting sick, or worse. Oh, sure, it has to taste pretty good, but that’s a bloody bore and a hassle to do with fresh ingredients and nearly impossible to do with any consistency on a huge scale. So, to make it as easy as possible, they spike mediocre ingredients with a bunch of chemicals to create the illusion that it’s actually made from fresh, vine-ripened, and humanely treated chicken nugget starter cultures (genetically modified so they grow their own batter!), and yeah, the best of it don’t taste too bad.
Fuck all that. All I want is a good tasting meal! I couldn’t care less whether these companies make a profit. I have no interest in helping them avoid lawsuits by voluntarily ingesting poison-preventing additives about which I know nothing. And I have even less interest in researching whether those additives have their own health consequences (or don’t). I don’t care. All I want to do is eat good food.
Let me put it another way. Who wants to eat something so fucking old it’s gotta be pumped with extra shit to make sure you don’t throw up? Who knows what else has been done to it, what else has been added, where it’s been, what corners have been cut? If all I want is something that tastes good – of course the food I eat shouldn’t make me sick, for goodness sakes! – why do I need to worry about any of this?
I don’t. Nobody does.
Everyone makes their own tradeoffs. Is it time consuming to cook my own food? Indeed it is. Is it expensive? Compared to feeding your family certain industrially manufactured preparations, it is.
For myself, I find it a complete waste of time to research which additives are safe, and which aren’t – and keep up with the latest discoveries and changes of opinions. If you eat food you prepare yourself, you don’t have to bother worrying whether or not HFCS is bad or merely empty calories – or what the latest study of BHA found out about its effects on rats. It’s all beside the point. As for cost, I’m solidly middle-class and I have the usual difficult financial choices to make that the middle-class does today. But really, my kid will go to a decent school whether I spend a little extra on organic eggs. The main hardship from eating well that I have to contend I really can’t afford to save up for one of these, and that breaks my heart, but if truth be told, at the rate I’d be able to save if I survived on cat food, I’d finally get one around the time of my 213th birthday.
As they say, ymmv, But the way I see it, whether the substances that American food companies want to add to your diet are very cancerous at high doses – or not – really isn’t the crucial issue. The real issue is whether these chemicals are required in order for me to eat delicious food. They aren’t, I don’t need ’em, I don’t want ’em. The end.