What is Food? Part 1 — Cheap and Convenient

Lessons Learned From Life Series, #1

What is food? Silly question. Who but a very young child doesn’t know? Apart from things like Poison Look-alikes: Dangerous Mimics Lurking in Your Home, we’ve got this under control, don’t we?

Well of course, poison control. But what’s behind this: Immigrants often eat high-calorie American junk food to fit in?

Immigrants to the United States and their U.S.-born children gain more than a new life and new citizenship. They gain weight. The wide availability of cheap, convenient, fatty American foods and large meal portions have been blamed for immigrants packing on pounds, approaching U.S. levels of obesity within 15 years of their move.

I’ve come across these stories repeatedly, and I’ve seen the evidence personally. The above is just one sample. During a phase of my life when I was working with refugees, not too many years ago, I was was warning the parents and their children about what happens. Many of them already knew, thankfully, and I encouraged them all to eat according to their traditions if they were able.

But let’s look at the above claim more closely

• cheap,

• convenient,

• fatty

• American foods

• and large meal portions

• … packing on pounds

Looking ahead for just a moment, we will ultimately need to consider what “packing on pounds” really represents. My term for it, undoubtedly politically incorrect, is “metabolic disease”. The big-picture question I am asking is, “Should ‘food’ that reliably causes severe disease be called “food”, or is that abusing the word?

For this post, however, let’s start with just the first two, “cheap and convenient”. I’d love to go into “fatty” also, but I would also love to get some sleep tonight and it’s too much to write about in one evening. Never mind that I already did, in the previous paragraph.

1. Cheap.

This pairs closely with “convenient”, but let’s look at “cheap” by itself first. I was going to present a particular argument I had for the relationship between lower food cost and lower food quality, but as I reviewed that subject I realized that I don’t have any good references for the argument beyond “Michael Pollan said so”. I have gone back and forth over the years with things he had to say, and he influenced me in a good way, but I think there’s an easier approach that doesn’t involve unraveling all that.

Goods get cheaper when produced using industrial methods. “Cheaper” carries a double meaning — lower cost and lower quality. Exceptions can be found, but there is a trend. Industrially farmed and processed food costs less than traditionally farmed food, if you are looking only at the market price. Industrial farming is corporate farming, and corporations generally seek to improve profitability. This leads to quality compromises, especially when the product, in this case, can look very much the same whether of low or high quality. (Again, in the interest of sleeping tonight, I won’t go into “industrial organic” here. But I do buy and eat the stuff, with caution.)

I don’t think this lower-cost, lower-quality idea is particularly controversial, irrespective of the advice of “eat less, exercise more”MD’s poorly trained in nutrition, and not talking about food quality. I wouldn’t typically cite information from a United Nations agency, but in 10 things you should know about industrial farming, this article was kind enough to include the following segment RE: industrial farming:

7. It has caused epidemics of obesity and chronic disease. 

Industrial agriculture produces mainly commodity crops, which are then used in a wide variety of inexpensive, calorie-dense and widely available foods. Consequently, 60 per cent of all dietary energy is derived from just three cereal crops–rice, maize and wheat.

Although it has effectively lowered the proportion of people suffering from hunger, this calorie-based approach fails to meet nutritional recommendations, such as those for the consumption of fruits, vegetables and pulses. The popularity of processed, packaged and prepared foods has increased in almost all communities. Obesity is also on the rise globally and many suffer from preventable diseases often related to diets, like heart disease, stroke, diabetes and some cancers.

Photo by Jerzy Górecki on Pixabay

[The article is nicely illustrated with a photograph following each segment, and I included the one for #7. Looks like they might be having a good lunch, munching on what they were made to eat, and what was made for them to eat.]

OK, so there’s cheap for you, before factoring in the great cost of “preventable diseases often related to diets, like heart disease, stroke, diabetes and some cancers“. If you are new to this topic, or maybe even if not, a keyword search for something such as “processed and ultra processed food” could be enlightening. This particular string of words was a top search suggestion presented to me as I began to enter my own search words — suggesting that many other people likely have been using it as well.

2. Convenient

This is true. In another, earlier phase of my life, I ate what I then called “programmer food” (I was and am a software developer), both from the grocery store and from fast food restaurants, and I ultimately attained morbid obesity before bringing my weight under control. Some of my coworkers could eat those things without that side effect, but not I.

But it was so convenient, at least until I ruptured a lumbar disc while I was merely obese. The loss of the ability to exercise after that is what propelled me all the way to morbidly so, since I didn’t change what I was eating.

I eat a different way now, that is neither cheap nor convenient. I cook nearly every meal, using the best quality from-nature ingredients that I can obtain within my capacity at this stage of life (70’s, with major lifelong health issues). My weight is steady at about half of its peak, a little under the middle of my BMI range, and I am not alone. Many others have done similar things with similar results.

This approach, however, does not work for everyone, and I have had to modify my own to work around a birth defect in my colon, and I had to eliminate all the pharmaceuticals I was taking before I could drop below being overweight.

My point is not that people could easily resolve their health problems by eating differently. It’s not that simple. It’s not simple. My point is…

3. Cheap and Convenient

Isn’t. It is, however, an advertising theme in modern life, and has been for quite a long time. I tend to want to think of it as dating back to the 1950’s, because I date back to 1950, but the theme dates back centuries.

Or millennia, depending on how you look at it. I usually think of “cheap and convenient” as a product of the scientific age, but when I look deeply, the scientific age appears as though it could have had its start in the Garden of Eden, with something called “the knowledge of good and evil.”¹

The English word “science” originally meant “knowledge”, as I noted somewhere in a comment on somebody else’s blog, deriving from the Old French word science, also meaning “knowledge”, deriving in turn from Latin, as Romance languages often will.²

Modern science is no stranger to evil. I hope to go into the subject of what science actually might be, in some depth in the future, but let’s see if I can make it through this series first.

“Cheap and convenient” is enabled by science and its offspring, technology. The phrase is a promise frequently made and, I would say, nearly always broken, when looking at the big picture of which it is a part. I will concede that useful, productive discoveries have been made, but advances that require marketing are a 🚩 for me.

I write from the belief that life is purposeful and exquisitely designed. Things do go wrong, and I don’t understand everything about that. Maybe I don’t even understand anything about it, but I notice that I learn from the mistakes I make, and my life wouldn’t be what it has been without them. “Convenience” is related to “comfortableness”, and I happen to think that “comfortable” is a shabby way to go through life.

What if we were to pause from our unceasing efforts to make things better, and to look upon what had already been accomplished before the first of us in all our cleverness ever appeared on the scene. What if we enquired of that — whatever it was that did the accomplishing? Would there be answers?

This is not an appeal to join something, or to begin following some philosophy or conform to some set of doctrines. It is related to the ancient writings known as The Holy Bible, but I am not promoting anything beyond reading from them for yourselves (it’s not so easy at first).

But before that, direct your questions about your life, life in general, and about the times in which we live back to the source from which we came. Who are we? What are we doing here? What in the world is going on? What is the way forward? Ask, and then listen. And then read. And then listen. It’s not likely that you will hear words, but you may well receive answers, and they may arrive in unlikely and unexpected ways.

Matthew 7:7   “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 8 “For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.

1. Genesis 2:9,16-17, 3:All

2. See Science in Online Etymology Dictionary