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A lot of scary sounding processed ingredients are perfectly safe and as natural as like orange juice or cheese.
I know it's more ideal to eat a perfect from-scratch cake, but I wouldn't let a few processed ingredients get in the way of appreciating the cultural and social aspects of someone making a cake for me.
And yes, most industrial, chemical, ingredients are harmless. That said, around the world, there's a emphasis on non-processed food. Unprocessed foods tend towards healthier. Less added sugar, less saturated fat etc.
I guess, taken as an overall picture, American health is perceived as poor. Poor food choices. Poor food-related outcomes and so on. That's predicated on a food culture that prioritizes cost, profit, quantity, ubiquity etc over health and quality.
Taken in that light, arguing in favor of processed foods seems like a outcome most countries would like to avoid.
> I garuntee a box mix will make a much better cake than "from scratch" unless you are very experienced.
That is simply untrue. It does not take an experienced baker to make a better cake than a boxed cake mix. The fact that you can avoid the other weird ingredients (which are probably not terrible at small scale) is just the icing on the cake.
As others have said elsewhere, some of the ingredients involved are not easily available/cost-efficient for the home baker. This means it's more than possible that you will get an objectively better cake from a mix, e.g. from blind tasting.
This does depend on the type of cake you're baking and your expectations of 'better' though.
Would love to see such a video. I could imagine using certain box mixes for certain specific purposes, but for most of their baking? I cannot imagine this being claimed by even a casual cook/baker.
> some of the ingredients involved are not easily available/cost-efficient for the home baker
Sure, but some of these are also only necessary because the box has to have a very long shelf life. If you buy your staple ingredients every month or two, you don't need stabilizers and such.
Maybe expectations for cake in the USA are different from the rest of the world, like it is for sliced bread (soft as a pillow). I seriously doubt bakeries in most of europe use cake mixes, or at least nothing with a similar laundry list of chemicals.
Blind testing is missing the point - you're not trying to emulate some perfect standard. The little imperfections and variances in the result are the value.
Unless you are specifically out to gain weight or needing extra calories due to hard work, you should not be drinking your calories. With orange juice you have sugars stripped from fibre and you can glug the sugars in a dozen oranges just glugging away for a few seconds. To eat those oranges would take an hour if you had to peel them first.
Cheese is worst thing ever for saturated fat, which clogs the arteries, gives you diabetes and sends you to hospital for some bypass surgery. Besides, what is natural about consuming dairy? The bull gets jerked off, the cow gets artificially inseminated, the baby gets eaten and the milk for the baby gets stolen. That is just plain weird. Technically everything is natural if you want to see it that way.
Cakes are just fats, sugars and additives, sometimes with some fruit in there, but you are right, these things have to be consumed just because it is a cultural tradition. Healthy cigarettes are just as easy to find, and cigarettes are arguably a cultural tradition. The more you look into it, the more messed up it is.
Chocolate is particularly messed up, with small children that should be at school sifting the beans for us in Ghana. Then there is climate change, with cocoa supplies being so low at the moment.
Undoubtedly cake brings joy but there is all of this misery and cruelty that goes into the ingredients. Haven't even got as far as where the red food colouring comes from. Yet it all started so innocently.
At least no almonds got jerked off in the process.
People have been eating cheese and yogurt for ten thousand years. It's not weird - trying to make it weird is weird!
I'm not trying to be mean, but I am giving unsolicited feedback - trying that angle to convince people to not eat cheese is only gonna work on your choir. Everyone else is gonna wonder why tf you're thinking of bulls being jerked off, and then go right back to enjoying cheese. Certain varieties have excellent macros and price ratios so the health angle doesn't really work either.
Nobody's asking but personally I think the best path for vegans to take is the Impossible meat angle. I know folks that prefer it now that were 16oz steak guys. It's healthier and yummy and priced just about the same as a normal burger. Whip up the same for cheese and you're in business. Right now all the cheese alternatives are kinda bad and also give me the worst farts lol.
News alert: the cholesterol hypothesis is dead, but many people, like parent poster here, cannot let go:
https://www.sott.net/article/441076-The-cholesterol-hypothes...
Most of the world's agriculture concerns growing commodity crops to feed animals - 'big beef'. This is big business and the source of all hatchet jobs on Ancel Keys. Their message is simple, you don't need fruit and vegetables, you need steak and butter!
Find me one centenarian that got there by eating a diet heavy in saturated fats. Just one!!!
If you want your arteries blocked and if heart disease is considered advantageous, then your assertion (without sources) is correct. I think it is best that you chug down that steak and butter, and I will stick to food that contains fibre.