The agro-industrial complex in general convinced Americans to buy trademark branded products instead of real food
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tofu#History
Also, even though the link between smoked meats and cancer is now as incontrovertible as the link between say tobacco and cancer, the risk is far lower. So it's not like they're wildly unsafe, just kinda sorta of unsafe.
If you were a peasant in the 1800s expecting to live till 50, sausages and smoked meat would probably _increase_ your life expectancy due to the additional protein. You would also not live long enough, or eat so much of it as to have a significantly higher likelihood of getting cancer.
The context in which those foods are consumed is different today than it used to be. People live longer and consume way more meat (of every kind) than they used to. If you eat smoked meats and fish (and really any other meats) at the same rates as peasants of 200 years ago, I doubt they'll increase your cancer risk by all that much.
It doesn't tell us if it is optimal health wise to do such a thing.
The /actual/ ancient past was way more concerned about quantity and physiological performance in a 'can you get big on it' as a positive and 'how likely is it to kill you' as opposed to any high minded ideals.
Despite trying to sound like it 'real food' isn't a real goal or metric in the same way that dog breeds which don't have a purpose other than aesthetics defined by vapid breed standards rapidly become the canine counterpart to the Hapsburgs. Compare to a working dog breed's actual defacto requirements. "Smart enough to keep up with and herd livestock, mean enough to chase away predators but not so vicious it kills the livestock itself." is a real set of goals that constrains it into a functional space to optimize for and can even tolerate some wasteful vanity in appearance selection. Hell even something overspecialized like "Try to be the fastest on the race track without being so badly behaved that they are disqualified." is better.
I am convinced that the underlying issues be they dog breeds or food aren't the real problems but ways of thinking.
Just about anyone can make beer, grind flour, churn butter, or bake bread. Even make tofu.
I've started realizing that there is very little space for nuance and subjectivity in discussing things on HN
I have no objection to nuance and subjectivity. There's nothing wrong with someone saying "I like fresh salads and fish and tofu, but string cheese and Big Macs aren't for me". Certainly I wouldn't say that you must eat string cheese unless you have an ironclad reason to avoid it. What I object to (and what I think HN is particularly sensitive to) is trying to sneak personal preferences under the guise of loaded terms like "real food".
https://www.frigocheeseheads.com/en/products/everyday-snacki...
> INGREDIENTS: Low moisture part skim mozzarella cheese (pasteurized part skim milk, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes)
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Mozzarella-String-Che...
> Ingredients: Pasteurized milk, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes
https://www.sargento.com/our-cheese/string-stick/string-chee...
> Pasteurized Reduced Fat Milk, Cheese Culture, Salt, Enzymes, Vitamin A Palmitate.
Nope, not checking out
Why is it any faker than regular cheese? Perhaps I am not as intelligent as I'd like to think.
I've seen premade refrigerated pizza fly off the shelf. I've seen drinks with all kinds of highly processed ingredients sell like hotcakes. I've seen condiments with a list of ingredients as long as a phone book purchase by plenty of people that eat only "real food".
Protein powders and supplements intrigue me to no end. These are some of the most processed and unregulated things sold on shelves. But "real food" advocates literally eat them up.
One of my friends is making millions catering to this group. I've been trying to figure out how these shoppers think. To me, it doesn't seem like there's much in common. It seems to be mostly branding.
this is largely the same with other quasi-positive labels (esp. political ones). lots of $$ to be made here, as people generally want to reinforce both their own and others' perceptions of them.
This sort of thing always seems super american centric to me personally. It's common in chinese households to have a stash of frozen dumplings prepared in-kitchen, or frozen steamed buns, or various other frozen prepared foods that are kitchen staples. I get that if it's from a restaurant or big processing plant you might find things questionable, but if you prepare your own pizza and decide to freeze it for later I don't think anyone should besmirch you as suddenly less healthy compared to eating the pizza as soon as you made it.
> I've seen premade refrigerated pizza fly off the shelf.
To be fair most frozen pizza is terrible - pre-baked bread that you're reheating, little better than frozen cheese toast. Whereas premade pizzas tend to be freshly made and you're baking the dough. So they taste a lot better.
This is a string cheese sold on the UK. It looks like the product varies significantly between and within countries.
Pretty much all of these highly processed foods are highly processed in order to reduce cost in some way (e.g. increasing shelf life, decrease storage requirements, use a substitute ingredient, remove the need for some other product, etc). All the finicky bits of producing food (e.g handling ingredients that are much less shelf stable than the final product) and abstracts that away to some factory somewhere. All of this seems like you're getting something for nothing if you don't know it's unhealthy.
The technology and processes used to create stuff that is recognizable as "modern industrial food" were mostly developed and matured over the late 1800s and early 1900s. For reasons that should be immediately obvious cheap and shelf stable became highly sought after traits for ingredients in the 1930s and 1940s. Likewise a generation of people grew up seeing their parents shoe-horn products like Crisco into use cases formerly reserved for other more natural ingredients. Considering that they grew up on it it's no surprise they stocked their 1950s and 60s cupboards and pantries with the sorts of products that they were familiar with from their youth.
Of course marketing is icing on the cake but things, like cooking habits, that you generally learn from your parents are generally resistant to fast change without some sort of strong outside motivation.
https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/hidden-costs-industrial-agr...
That said, I think I value food that has fewer steps in preparation as being "more real" so I'd prefer something like a meat and onion skillet to beef wellington or a clumped cream chicken pot pie.
I think the title is terrible for choosing that specific word - I'd much prefer a title like "How Crisco Made Americans Believers in Artificial Food". And in actuality it's more of an issue of the government not preventing wholly unhealthy food from finding the wide markets they have.
What if I make them at my house and take them to someone else's home?
You can only be sure that sausages are "real food", if you make it yourself at home using the raw ingredients. Otherwise, no idea.
Edit: I see that you're a former lawyer. I'm going to assume it's a semantic word-play thing
But if you want to talk about curing meats, that's a fun topic. The ones my fam makes are way tastier than Jimmy Dean's
IMO any processed food that hasn't been around for a couple of generations should be treated with some suspicion.
If you want to define "processing" a loosey-goosey definition might be "anything that can't be done in the average kitchen using ingredients commonly found at a grocery store". By this definition, maybe breakfast cereals aren't processed - you could make Grape Nuts in your kitchen if you were sufficiently determined and masochistic. But it's a decent heuristic otherwise.