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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

Mostly about mechanical processing. Of course, the circulating epigram "don't eat something your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food" refers to processing with additives: artificial flavors, colors, preservatives and conditioners of various kinds. Not to mention almost completely synthetic concoctions.

It doesn't mean, for instance, "don't use soy sauce that has been processed the same way by the same company in Japan since the 1600's"; that is a horribly strawman interpretation of the idea.

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It's all about thinking about some idealistic past.

If great-grandma wasn't wealthy, she ate lots of tinned beef smothered in potassium nitrate, all sorts of stuff packed in gelatin/salt, etc over the winter. And lots of beans.

Most of my great-grandmothers were the daughters of Irish farmer. She probably shared a house with a cow and a dozen siblings, if they were lucky enough to own one. They had fresh milk with no anti-biotics, but also with no pasteurization or medical care for the cow. (Hopefully she didn't get sick.) No plastic bottles, but they drew water from a hand-dug well in a treeless landscape where cattle were the main farming activity. (ie. high probability of a contaminated water source) When you got to march, you didn't have to worry about pesticides in potatoes, but you did have to watch for worms.

Totally absolutely bang on.

What we have overcome vastly outweighs what we are killing ourselves with. At least until the zombie apocalypse

Sure, and several hundred years ago, lead acetate was used as a sweetener. There are some exceptions. :)

>It's all about thinking about some idealistic past. If great-grandma wasn't wealthy, she ate lots of tinned beef smothered in potassium nitrate, all sorts of stuff packed in gelatin/salt, etc over the winter. And lots of beans.

Not sure in which parts of the world this holds true.

In my part of the world, and we're talking a really pour country, everybody had their patch with vegetables etc, people caught fish, had animals (chicken etc) and all that. Most of the things they ate were fresh. For the non-fresh staff, they simply preserved it in salt (like they did with cod), or brine (e.g. for goat cheese, etc), or they dried it.

No "tinned beef smothered in potassium nitrate" and no "gelatin".

I'd say most of the places in Europe were like this, and some were still like that up until the 60s or 70s. And maybe people in NY, a huge city without ways to have your own produce and animals, ate all the "tinned beef" stuff, but I can't imagine many people doing that in Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, etc.

>Most of my great-grandmothers were the daughters of Irish farmer. She probably shared a house with a cow and a dozen siblings, if they were lucky enough to own one. They had fresh milk with no anti-biotics, but also with no pasteurization or medical care for the cow. (Hopefully she didn't get sick.) No plastic bottles, but they drew water from a hand-dug well in a treeless landscape where cattle were the main farming activity. (ie. high probability of a contaminated water source) When you got to march, you didn't have to worry about pesticides in potatoes, but you did have to watch for worms.

That's how people lived even up to the '70s in large parts of European countryside (Span, Italy, Greece, France, etc). From everybody I've talked to who lived like that in several countries, it wasn't particularly hard or bad. Farm work could be intensive but only for specific times of the year, most of the year they didn't have to do much if at all. And living with several siblings in a small house was just what everybody did, so they didn't feel they miss out on anything. Most of the time they were out and around in the village anyway.

real simple googling points out what I've read in several preservation books. Per wikipedia: "In the process of food preservation, potassium nitrate has been a common ingredient of salted meat since the Middle Ages"

SaltPeter has been around for a long time. Given that nitrates/nitrites help with botulism and the age of discovery & uses, I'd be surprised if it was a modern (post 1800's) thing, and wiki backs me up. For sure by the time Europeans were heavily in north america it would be in wide spread use. I mean they were using it for gunpowder too :)

When using them, you don't use much, but you use it. It also means you can use less regular salt.

Basically all agricultural societies have historically been feudal, with a small minority of nobles, scribes, and clergy; a larger group of soldiers, merchants, and tradesmen; and a mass of peasant farmers (some such societies still persist today). The peasants, whether formally free or slaves, were almost everywhere treated as a disposable resource by the nobles, who stole, raped with abandon, killed on a whim, and believed themselves to be innately superior. For peasants, food was often scarce even in rich lands during prosperous times, and the majority of calories came from staple starches. Winter was hard. Peasants mostly lived in simple poorly insulated houses, cooked over indoor hearths (= much worse air to breathe than heavy cigarette smoking or modern industrial air pollution), lacked modern understanding and infrastructure for sanitation, had poor access to medicine or other healthcare (only healers with knowledge of local plants and religious figures to pray for them), had little if any formal education, etc. etc.

Pre-mechanized agriculture, along with completely decentralized child-rearing, food preparation, hauling water from a well or river, weaving and sewing, house construction, carpentry, etc. just takes an absurdly enormous amount of manual work, and when the local strong-men demand their cut in return for protection, there’s little left over for the peasants.

Life expectancy, health, median material wealth, gender/social equality, &c. were across-the-board dramatically worse in agricultural societies than in hunter/gatherer societies.

>she ate lots of tinned beef smothered in potassium nitrate //

The injunction is surely not to eat foods available now that your grandmother wouldn't recognise as food rather than to eat what your grandmother actually ate.

Taken that way it's not saying the past diets were ideal but that the completely new foods are generally less healthy than the progressively developed foods.

You seem to have made an logically erroneous negation of the assertion being addressed.

Maybe the idea should be better stated if it's so easily misunderstood.

I believe this is the origin of that phrase:

http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/six-rules-for-eati...

And, well, I don't really know what was meant by it. It decries Twinkies and Vitamin Water, but it also decries yogurt just because it's in a tube. Does shape matter for yogurt?

He exalts fresh produce as the pinnacle of health, yet my great-great-great grandmother would have had extremely limited access to it for most of the year, and probably would not recognize most of the stuff I'm able to buy in the store.

It's not a straw man when you legitimately don't understand what was intended.

epoxy-like tubes of Go-Gurt

Well, the important part of that statement is probably epoxy-like which is probably meant to describe the consistency of the Go-Gurt. What makes go-gurt more epoxy-like than yogurt and what that adjective means elude me though

It's probably not worth getting bogged down in the details when it comes to Pollan's polemics, but in my (admittedly limited) understanding the whole point of GoGurt is that it's less thick than ordinary yogurt, so you can suck it out of the tube...I'm having a hard time believing he's ever actually eaten a GoGurt.

Gogurt is actually really thin, more like thicker cream. It's not the good spackley (and tasty) stuff like greek yogurt or my favourite redwood farms goat yogurt (YUMM!!!).

This is a great point. My great-great-great grandmother lived in Martin County, Kentucky, most likely ate mostly cornbread and string beans in fatback her whole life, and never saw quinoa or kale so long as she lived before dying in childbirth. I'm not exactly sold on this as a model lifestyle.

Kale was in heavy use in the 19th century (re Wikipedia and other sources). Kale and Chard are also heartier plants and can be grown late in the year, giving you those fresh leafy greens way after other stuff gives up. Given that Kale gets it's name from the Scott's Irish... and that That area was 57% english, 25% scott, 9% irish... yeah they very likely ate kale. Fatback too. Probbably whole parts of the hog. The corn for the cornbread, however, most likely went into whiskey depending on the age of your great^3 as up until prohibition, thanks to Andrew Jackson, it was one of the most efficient ways to move corn around (in barrels of distillate), as ~10 bushels -> 1Bbl of Whiskey.

Quinoa, however, was much later, coming not from europe, but peru.

(edited for tone)

Lol...I take it you've never been to that part of the USA.

Actually my wife is from that area but sure I quoted links instead of anecdote so I'm obviously making it up. What's your data from that time period?

My data is generations of my own family living in the same place, where I have also lived functionally my whole life, about which I think I'm allowed a little introspection in this casual discussion without having to cite some manner of study you'd approve of.

Whether I'm off the mark about kale or not is far beside the point. The fact is that my great-great-great grandmother and my great-great grandmother and on down to probably no more than a couple of generations ago...none of them would have had reliable or easy access to the kind of fresh food I do today, and they wouldn't have been familiar with the bigger portion of what I can find in practically any grocery store anywhere. It's not about whether or not there was kale growing in East Kentucky.

I don't believe you have much idea what your great-great-great-grandmother did or didn't have access to, or what she was or wasn't familiar with. I'm sure you never met her. Did you read her diary or something? Have you tried cooking from her recipe book? Or are you just assuming, based on no evidence, that East Kentucky in 1810 was basically the same as East Kentucky in 1920, or whenever your grandparents grew up?

It's plenty likely that you and your own parents wouldn't have been familiar with the bigger portion of what your great-great-great-grandmother ate, either. And some of that was fresh food. East Kentucky had a lot more fresh plants in it back then than it does now.

I'm not very interested in what you believe, actually. My point—which is that the way people subsisted on the Kentucky frontier 200 years ago would probably not have been congruent with Pollan's idyllic notion of the good food granny ate in the old country—doesn't seem to be of anyone else's interest. I won't belabor it.

> Does shape matter for yogurt?

In this case, yes? Gogurt is full of sugar. Of course the same can be true for yogurt in tubs as well. I feel the straw-manning of Pollan's writing is usually achieved by taking what is meant to be general guidance, pretending it's quite specific and stringent, and then poking logical holes in it.

Generally, the more packaging and marketing that went into something to get you to buy it, the more horseshit you'll find in it too. Generally.

Again, if the guidance is so easy to misunderstood then perhaps it is the guidance's fault, not the fault of the people misunderstanding it.

Apparently there's some underlying meaning to "Don’t eat anything your great-great-great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food." that I'm not understanding. I'm not understanding it because my concept of what my great^3 grandmother would recognize as food, and the understanding of the person who wrote it, are extremely different. Yet the person who wrote it does not explain what he meant by it, and somehow this is my fault?

The past is not a region known for great nutrition. Taking food guidance from it doesn't seem very wise to me. I gather that this phrase is more along the lines of, "think of the idyllic, utopian, imaginary past that certain people believe is what it was actually like, and eat what they would have eaten," but that's not real helpful!

It's still a nonsense idea, and panders to the myth that people from a hundred years ago knew how to do things "right", and we've somehow forgotten. In actuality, food quality now is better than ever before, regardless of the fear mongering. People are healthier, live longer, and are larger of frame because of the better nutrition. In great-grandmother's time things like rickets were much more prevalent than today. Ye Olde Folks got things wrong left, right, and centre, and we get fewer things wrong today.

Far better than the throwaway "What Would Granny Do?" is "Understand How Food Works". Not to mention staples of alternative cuisines - for example, my great-grandmother would not recognise tofu as a food, yet would recognise Spam.

I sometimes wonder how many people in Europe are scared of additives because of the E-Number system that doesn't look natural at all and immediately makes you think that there are "chemicals" in your food. Who wants "E 300" in their food? Probably most random people you ask would say they don't want it without hesitation. Yet it's just Vitamin C.

IMO (I'm one of these Europeans) there's good reasons to avoid additives and there's bad ones. There seems to be a relationship between additives and the prevalence of obesity. That may not be causal, but at least when it comes to Artificial Flavours the mechanism of that happening seems pretty clear to me. Preservatives is something that seems to be much less needed in a typical European urban lifestyle (shopping for food at least 2 times a week). I like to differentiate additives in different groups:

Citric Acid. Should be just fine, apart from citrus allergy.

Other preservatives and nitrates. I'm weary about those, i.e. I try not to eat much. As an example, so far I haven't seen a good counterproof against the Hawaiian nitrate study [1]. If alternatives without such preservatives are available I will choose those (and instead take care to eat it quickly).

Artificial Flavouring. I try to limit these since it tricks me into eating more.

Vitamins. Don't care if they're in there, but I won't buy a product just because of added Vitamins - I'm eating enough fresh produce.

Things that make the product look/sell better but give me no benefit, e.g. food colouring. I'm trying to avoid those, it's probably fine but I don't see why I should eat something my body hasn't been exposed to during human evolution that doesn't have any benefit.

[1] http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/97/19/1458.full.pdf

Citric acid is mainly produced by microbial fermentation so there is little worry even if you have a citrus allergy.

Interesting. I know someone with that allergy who avoids all citric acids, so I assumed this was a problem.

Food labeling seems to be getting excessively ambiguous, “spices,” “flavor”, “natural flavor,” and “artificial flavor” are all legal USDA terms. I'm not exactly sure what's legal or being used in food processing factories, but industrial solvents and other chemicals used to modify foods are not legally required to be listed as ingredients. Given the ambiguous black box of industrial food processing, it's only mildly disappointing to actively avoid processed foods like Girl Scout cookies and frozen foods.

Historically, it's often taken decades to discover the toxicity of chemical innovations thought to be safe like DDT, BPA, pesticides, asbestos, lead, & C8/Teflon [2] . Acrylamide is now suspected as carcinogenic [3] and forms from heating starchy foods, notably cooked potatoes.

[1] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10045156 [ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/11/dupont-chemist... ]

[3] http://www.who.int/foodsafety/areas_work/chemical-risks/acry... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylamide#Toxicity_and_carcin...

Then there is all the alternative naming. Some people don't want to buy crap loaded with MSG, so it gets called by names like "hydrolized vegetable protein".

My favourite so far has been "dehydrated cane juice".

I still see that in Canada, but in the US the FDA has gone after companies for improper labelling because sugar isn't juice.

I saw it in the US last week. I agree that sugar isn't juice, but technically if you take juice and dehydrate it, you get crystalized sugar.

I get the "technically" but I believe that the FDA was going after it as a deceptive labelling practice.

And deceptive it arguably is. The clear issue is not that people are too dumb to realize that dehydrating cane juice results in sugar, but that when they scan the ingredients looking for "sugar", they may not always spot its disguised form.

And the less egregious "skimmed milk powder". Sure, it also has some protein in it, but it's definitely used a lot in baby/children's food as a sweetener just so they can say "no added sugar".

acrylamide is a byproduct of cooking a Starches, a practice which goes back centuries older than our grandmothers, and seems to be as dangerous as everything else, now that scientists at able to detect toxins at 100-1000x more dilute concentrations than are health threats.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylamide

There was a big hoopla surrounding Acrylamide some 13 years ago. It was a real bogey man for a while ("OMG, there is a deadly poison in anything you cook and fry; we are doomed!"). You don't hear about it much nowadays.

> BPA

When BPA was added to plastics it was known to be toxic. The issue was that it was thought to be inert and encapsulated in the material. The revelation came when we found that extreme heat (e.g. in your microwave) or extreme cold (e.g. in your freezer) causes it to leach out of the material and into (e.g.) you food.

I remember reading a study in 2005 that said that cold had nothing to do with it (from Harvard). Just googled it now and now the same group says "even drinking cold water for a week resulted in increased levels in the urine".

Grreat.

"it's often taken decades to discover the toxicity of chemical innovations thought to be safe like [...] C8/Teflon [2]"

You appear to be conflating the toxicity of C8/PFOA (previously used in the manufacturing of PTFE (Teflon®) with that of Teflon itself. The article you linked to is primarily about the health risks to those involved in the manufacturing of PTFE through exposure to PFOA.

However, regarding the toxicity of PTFE itself:

American Cancer Society: "[...] there are no known risks to humans from using Teflon-coated cookware. While PFOA is used in making Teflon, it is not present (or is present in extremely small amounts) in Teflon-coated products.' [1]

US Environmental Protection Agency: "[...] consumer products made with fluoropolymers and fluorinated telomers, including Teflon® and other trademark products, are not PFOA. [...] The information that EPA has available does not indicate that the routine use of consumer products poses a concern." [2]

[1] http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancercauses/othercarcinogens/a...

[2] http://www.epa.gov/opptintr/pfoa/pubs/pfoainfo.html

"Synthetic concoctions". Oooo, that's almost as bad as "chemicals".

There's no short-cut to figuring out whether food is healthful. Some processed food is quite healthful, some is not. Some fresh food is healthful, some is not. Some food your great-grandmother ate you should absolutely never put in your mouth, and idealizing her diet is not a smart thing to do.

I've read a fair bit of Pollan's books, and I think you're spot on here. He's not against processing food (heck, he'd probably argue that is a defining trait of humanity), but rather, as you point out, synthetic or heavily-processed foods.

I think that when my great-grandmothers were alive (from the late 1800s up to the 1940s) food additives in use that are now banned included red lead, white lead, diethylene glycol, fishberries, opium, cocaine, strychnine, sawdust, vermilion, toxic copper salts (including cupric hydrogen arsenite!), and hydrogenated vegetable oil containing trans fats.

To quote from a 1909 book about one of the pioneers:

    The latter part of the eighteenth 
    and the first quarter of the nineteenth century were marked 
    by international strife, political upheaval, and suffering among 
    the toilers. Cobbett, Burdett, and 'Orator' Hunt in 1817 
    were agitating for Parliamentary reform. Agricultural depression
    was extreme, and commercial probity was at its nadir. 
    For threescore years the food of the people had been poor 
    and dear. Contemptible and gross adulterations of all
    conceivable kinds were everywhere the rule. The dough of 
    bread was mingled with alum, carbonate of lime, bone ash, 
    potatoes, and beans. By eking out his sugar with gypsum 
    chalk, and pipe-clay, the sweetmeat-maker derived unholy 
    gains; and the pigments used contained lead, chromium, 
    mercury, copper, sometimes even arsenic. The unwholesome
    hues of preserved green fruits and vegetables were due 
    to boiling in copper vessels, or to the addition of cupreous 
    salts.  Cayenne pepper and curry powder were beautified 
    by the scarlet oxide of lead. Vinegar was fortified with 
    sulphuric acid. Canistered fish were tinted red by
    ferruginous earths.

Now, some of these are still in use; gypsum "chalk" is harmless and an essential ingredient in many foods; alum is safe up to a certain level, and is an important ingredient in some kinds of pickling; sulfuric acid is perfectly harmless in sufficiently small quantities (it's GRAS, but I think still illegal in vinegar, and dangerously prone to pick up heavy metals); and as far as I know you can still tint your canned fish red with ochre, which is GRAS too. And bone ash won't hurt you, unless maybe it's infected with Mad Cow Disease. The others, though, are dangerous, and now they have very strict maximum permissible levels.

The situation started to improve during my great-grandmothers' lifetimes.

http://www.rsc.org/Education/EiC/issues/2005Mar/Thefightagai... talks a bit about the history of processing foods with additives.

Unfortunately, some of the less toxic preservatives are still in wide use, like nitrate and nitrite, even though these have been convincingly shown to cause stomach cancer.

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