Food Scientists Are Getting Fed Up with Picky Eaters
There&#x27;s quite a few comments in here about how food scientists shouldn&#x27;t have put so many things in foods to begin with. Well, look. There&#x27;s a handful of reasons anything ends up intentionally added to large-scale industrial foods:<p>1) To improve taste,
2) To improve texture (or to preserve texture for products -- emulsifiers and binders added to keep dressings from separating, for instance),
3) To improve shelf life and preserve the food,
4) To stand in for something more expensive (artificial vanilla in place of the real thing, or HFCS in place of sugar that has import tariffs on it), or
5) To improve health outcomes. (Think of cereals fortified with vitamins, or iodized salts -- iodine deficiency was a major health threat until the introduction of iodized salt).<p>Yes, things that improve taste aren&#x27;t always good for you -- they&#x27;re often refined carbs or fats or both. But it turns out that in order to get a bottle of ranch dressing that can sit on the shelf for weeks before being purchased, last for months in your fridge, and still have a creamy integration of oil and water (things that want to separate!) without having to be stirred or shaken every use. If you don&#x27;t want to buy that ranch dressing, that&#x27;s fine. You can make your own, or make a vinaigrette. But there&#x27;s not some vast conspiracy to add chemicals to food. And people add thickeners and emulsifiers to food when they cook at home all the time. &quot;Xanthan gum&quot; is not any less healthy for you than agar-agar or gelatine, and it&#x27;s used for basically the same thing, it just has different properties. (Gelatin is removed from commercial broths and stocks all the time because it makes it unappealing to pour out of the carton at room temperature, for instance. This is one reason making your own stock and broth yields better soup.)<p>And the upshot of all of this is that we&#x27;ve made lots of foods cheaper, more plentiful and less time-consuming to prepare than at any other point in human history. That&#x27;s had real effects on society -- not all of them good, see our obesity epidemic in the US, but on the whole, you can see what people were doing, it wasn&#x27;t a plot to give us TEH CHEMICALS, it was an effort to give a civilization unparalleled amounts of food security and let people specialize in life outside of the home. (There&#x27;s an entire tangent about the intersection of technical and social progress, and the interaction between convenience foods and women being freed from being homemakers to entering the workforce and being independent.)<p>Is all of it good? No. Would it be good for people to become more educated and make better decisions about what to eat here? Yes. But that&#x27;s not what the article is talking about. There&#x27;s parallels to medicine here -- on one hand, the pharma industry is clearly devoted to profits above all else, and they do all sorts of infuriating things in both the market (slightly altering drugs in order to make new ones that are just as effective but still under patent, jacking up the price of insulin, etc.) and in science (there&#x27;s tons of scientific studies you can&#x27;t trust because pharma companies will run a bunch of studies and file drawer the ones that don&#x27;t help them). It would be better if people could make more informed decisions about health, if the market wasn&#x27;t distorted to misalign the incentives of consumers and producers, if there was more transparency and better science. But the opposition to commercially-funded pharma studies is not principled and it does not improve your health outcomes. It&#x27;s stuff like the anti-vax crusade that is letting diseases largely eradicated come back, and Gweneth Paltrow selling folk remedies to the gullible and clueless. The same thing is true in nutrition -- people who are decrying chemical additives in food or pitching you on fad diets are not trying to help you fight against large agribusiness, they are exploiting your skepticism of large agribusiness in order to enrich themselves at your expense. MSG is fine. &quot;Nitrate free&quot; cured meats have more nitrates (but naturally occurring ones, from celery!) than ones not so labelled. Produce labelled as &quot;organic&quot; often come with more pesticides than regular produce because of how you have to grow organic produce and still get high yields, meaning that they can be less safe for many people. A general rule of thumb is that if you don&#x27;t trust a company when they&#x27;re putting xantham gum in your food, you shouldn&#x27;t trust what they&#x27;re replacing it with, either, even if the name sounds more natural or some food blogger is telling you that xanthan gum causes sterility or whatever.