Things food snobs are wrong about

“Organic” isn’t better for you or for the environment. It actually means nothing of any significance at best and is sometimes even the more wasteful, more hazardous option.
A shitload of “natural” food including a lot of imported produce is grown and harvested through slave labor in inhumane conditions.
Pizza, fried chicken, french fries, fast food, candy bars and chips ARE nutritious. They are loaded with good things. Just because they have an abundance of excess fats and might not be healthy as a staple doesn’t mean they are “nutritionless” or that their calories are “empty.” Those are hokey buzzwords pushed by the people in charge of how much you pay for the alternatives.
Eating healthier costs more. Much more. Looking down on people for their reliance on cheaper food is extremely classist and expecting everyone to be able to live off fresh veggies and cage-free meats is insultingly unrealistic in the modern world.
“Processed” literally only means the food went through some kind of automated process. This can be literally the exact same thing a human being would have done to the food for it to be labeled “unprocessed.” Being processed does not make something less healthy.
Chemicals with long, scary names are part of nature. An apple is full of compounds you probably can’t pronounce. A shorter ingredients label only means they didn’t bother listing all 300 things the product is actually made of and HAS to be made of.
Preservatives, artificial flavors and other additives are not the devil. Most are harmless and in general they are part of the reason you haven’t already starved to death or died of a food borne illness.
MSG is not bad for you at all.
The fact that something might be made of “scrap” meats like pig snouts or chicken necks only means one thing: that we didn’t waste perfectly normal, edible meat.
I DON’T KNOW HOW I FORGOT THIS IN MY FIRST VERSION OF THIS POST BUT GMO’S ARE NOT DANGEROUS TO EAT. GMO’S ARE SAVING LIVES. YOU’VE ALREADY EATEN GMO’S BEFORE YOU EVEN KNEW THE TERM. IT’S FINE. EAT THEM.

pastrygeckos

It pisses me off when big time chefs go “guys do you not know what goes into canned meatballs? They’re disgusting!” yeah parts of the animal they don’t use for anything else and also they’re tasty fuck you

kawaiite-mage

@lazysatyr wanted sources so here you go

Organic farms produce up to 25% less food for the same amount of land used as opposed to conventional modern farms, and almost never produce more food.

Organic farms also, due to the nature of organic food being more labor and resource intensive, rely strongly on slave and underpaid labor even in America.

It is harder to back the nutritional value of greasy foods, but typically known fatty foods, such as red meats, cheese, and various oils, are found in diets that are intentionally high in fat, but low in carbohydrates. THese are called ketogenic diets and oddly enough are considered quite healthy and good for weight loss.

The Harvard School of Public Health conducted a meta-analysis that found healthy eating habits cost about $1.50 more per day than if someone were not as health-conscious.

“Processed” is so vague and broad that you could define almost every food ever as processed unless you plucked it from the ground yourself.

Alpha-Linolenic-Acid, Asparagine, D-Categin, Isoqurctrin, Hyperoside, Ferulic-Acid, Farnesene, Neoxathin, Phosphatidyl-Choline, Reynoutrin, Sinapic-Acid, Caffeic-Acid, Chlorogenic-Acid, P-Hydroxy-Benzoic-Acid, P-Coumaric-Acid, Avicularin, Lutein, Quercitin, Rutin, Ursolic-Acid, Protocatechuic-Acid, and Silver are all chemicals found in apples.

Turns out excessive preservatives aren’t super great for you. Traditional ways of preserving foods, such as pickling or dehydrating, aren’t bad for you but things like nitrites in meat are.

However, artificial flavors are more often than not the exact same chemical one would find in nature, except synthesized in a lab. This means they can be produces in greater quantities and with less harm to the environment than by extracting them from natural sources. Again, there is no chemical difference whatsoever between natural and artificial flavors, the difference is only where they come from.

A horse’s worth of MSG injected into a mouse will cause health problems, but people are not mice and we don’t inject it. No consistent negative health effects have been linked to MSG.

I could find no material that references pig snouts and chicken necks as any different from meat from the more commonly eaten parts of those animals. Most people use them in soups to make a stronger broth, since they do contain a lot of flavor despite not a lot of tangible meat.

GMOs have no negative health affects, as has been shown by countless studies for the past couple decades. Crops are genetically modified to allow for healthier alternatives to pesticides, high crop yields over a smaller area of land, and reduced consumption of water and fertilizer by the crops. GMOs are much better for the health of humans, the environment, and society as a whole in the long term.

bogleech

Hey thanks! I didn’t add sources to the original post just because I thought it was minor personal venting and not something that would get tens of thousands of notes.

jumpingjacktrash

quite frankly, just about anything you eat is a GMO, it’s just been modified by centuries of selective breeding. drought-resistant rice isn’t a mad science monster. please calm down everyone.

higglety

the whole exact reason we started creating fertilizers pesticides and GMOs was specifically to increase crop yields. that’s it. that’s the reason. Organic farms are all well and good but they don’t produce food efficiently. that’s one reason organic produce is more expensive - because there is less of it (and because of the increased labor required to produce it).

justalurkr

All of this. The green revolution was to keep us from starving to death when our population exceeded the natural carrying capacity of the planet a few billion people ago. That’s always been my biggest bone to pick with the “industrial food chain evil!” crowd; what is their plan for feeding eight billion people with arable land for four or maybe five?

bogleech

I got another burst of angry “healthy eaters” commenting on this so I’m re-re-re-reblogging the version with sources and some of the better recent additions.

stievienicks reblogged

chonce

stievienicks reblogged

chonce

we-are-star-stuff

Herd immunity is the idea that if enough people get immunized against a disease, they’ll create protection for even those who aren’t vaccinated. This is important to protect those who can’t get vaccinated, like immunocompromised children.

You can see in the image how low levels of vaccination lead to everyone getting infected. Medium levels slow down the progression of the illness, but they don’t offer robust protection to the unvaccinated. But once you read a high enough level of vaccination, the disease gets effectively road-blocked. It can’t spread fast enough because it encounters too many vaccinated individuals, and so the majority of the population (even the unvaccinated people) are protected.

Find out more here.