I ate a beyond meat sausage for dinner tonight. It tasted very close, but not quite the same as an actual sausage. Perhaps it was just the fact that I knew it wasn't the real thing that made it taste different. It makes me wonder if I could identify a plant based sausage in a blind taste test. Most of the protein in it was extracted from peas, which are naturally high in protein and have a much more complete nutrition profile than the sausage. It would have probably have been better for me to just eat straight peas.
don't know if anyone can really say it's "better" or worse to eat straight peas. beyond meat stuff has heme from beetroot if I remember correctly, most of the ingredients are p good. I think you'd be able to identify the beyond sausage in a blind test, but it's still incredibly close to the texture of minced meat / sausage / patty and that's really what it's all about for me. I think it's a really impressive product, gotta say. I could eat that burger every day. shame it's super expensive over here.
Alcohol and milk products are just the ones we know about, i.e. the ones with such glaring, immediate effects that we can measure and categorize just how they can go wrong. I'm assuming that there are more subtle problems hiding in the giant list of foods modern humans consume.
I doubt it, because most of the foods that come from the utmost different parts of the earth are so chemically similiar. alcohol is a literal poison and the fact that some humans are resistant to it is not to be seen as good, but a necessary evil. drinking milk from other animals is just incredibly weird as hell if you think about it for longer than 5 seconds and really more of a freak of nature deal than something "normal". other animals probably can't drink human milk either, I'd wager, depending on the animal.
example: all grains are different in chemical composition, but really when it comes down to it they're simple carbs or complex carbs. it probably doesn't matter one bit whether your ancestors ate white rice or wheat flour. matter of fact wheat flour isn't even European in origin, but pretty much all people from Europe to Asia could digest it without any problem, even though it is the most gluten-rich food in existance.
you're lacking the historical knowledge here, but often times food came from incredibly specific places and only slowly spread all over the world, usually without bad reactions. like chickens for example. every single common chicken in the history of food can be traced back to some small population of jungle-dwelling foul in a specific location in south-east asia. but still, our ancestors ate chicken. even when you go back one or two thousand years they did. so where is the cutoff? if one could only eat the foods that originally grew in that location, we could literally only eat one or two cultivars of one or two fruits and vegetables each. it's such a limiting and absolutely nonsensical view on food. almost every food can be traced back to a specific location, but why shouldn't Italians and Germans make bread with wheat flour, why shouldn't Americans and Australians eat rice, why shouldn't Thai or Chinese cuisine use chili, why shouldn't the Irish eat potatoes? if there were large scale problems, for example with the Irish digesting potatoes, don't you think someone would have noticed in the last hundreds of years? no, we can eat foreign foods just fine. it's rather overengineered food that is dangerous, and on that point I agree with you. but it's not apples or oranges that are at the pinnacle of overengineered foods, but rather ready-meals and snack foods.
It is unnerving, but there are still more and less alien foods. Stick to the less alien ones.
I was under the impression that selection had a role in it. Is this correct? If it is, then I imagine the foreign materials entering one's body every single day to be assimilated into cells and energy would account for a high proportion of that.
This right here perfectly demonstrates your fundamental misunderstanding. Instead of directing your anger towards overengineered foods you're an outspoken food xenophobe, you think foods are inherently unhealthy because they're not what your ancestors ate. "Foreign materials entering your body" holy moly.. Foods are almost all broken down into the same compounds over and over again. It doesn't matter at all if you're eating palm sugar, brown sugar, white sugar, molasses, HFCS, or honey for the most part. They're all slightly different, but they're also the same ****** thing chemically, fructose and sucrose combined in different ways. that's what your body breaks it down into, and what is then further broken down into energy. calory wise or nutrition wise it makes very little difference which of those you eat. they taste slightly different, have slightly different nutrient profiles, but fundamentally they're all the same. and that goes for most foods. so yeah, even though you likely never had palm sugar in your life, it is not a foreign material. it is digested and used up in the exact same way that white sugar is. your body will not react different to it in any way, shape or form. hope we go that out of the way now.
there are 'alien' foods out there, thousands of them. but they aren't oranges or ginger, they're cheetos, alcopops, american ""cheese"", glued meat.. there's so many foods being made with actual alien ingredients, ones we've genuinely never eaten before, maybe that is where you should look when you say words like 'alien'.
That's not my experience. I simply lost all taste for 'real foods', regardless of what they were. I think you should consider that, despite your evidently vast and profound knowledge of foodstuffs, the scientists who engineer fast food to be addictive know more than you.
I've gotten to know some of those "scientists" who "engineer food" and yeah, most of them aren't malicious geniuses, but kinda boring every day dudes. you don't need a complete genius to figure out that sugar and salt is highly addictive, and the correct amounts are surely gathered from blind testing, which really any researcher can do. maybe I've mentioned it once, but a friend of mine studied food science and food engineering, and has been involved in the making of soft drinks and other stuff. there's little being done in terms of laboratory work. most, actually almost all of the workers, are workers, and people observing said workers. generally speaking it's doubtful that food is engineered to harm you, rather it is engineered to sell well. the fact that we humans love sugar and salt is the reason why masses of "unhealthy" foods are sold.
they operate on a different level than I do. generally those people you are talking about engineer to cater to the lowest common denominator. their goal is not to sell the best food, or best-tasting food, or most addictive food, no. they simply engineer food so that it sells well, that the biggest amount of people will like it enough to buy it. that's your end-goal if you're working in that niche.
it's a shame you lost all tastes for "real food", but that's on you buddy. I eat plenty of overtly spiced food, overtly hood food, very salty food, very fatty food, very sweet food, and I still pop one whenever I bite into a good cucumber. I still get aroused by a peach. I care for the neglected bean. I can pig out on white rice. sometimes I eat herbs just by themselves, or go out foraging weird greens that grow in my parents garden. see, it's your personal problem. and it's not caused by flavor in itself, but rather by your psychological addiction to salt and sugar. it's a problem you have to overcome both mentally and physically. I don't even doubt that your idea of eating unseasoned stuff is bad, in fact it might be just what you need. but flavor and seasoning are of course completely different, almost everything has flavor. and it's not the problem here.
as for fruit getting sweeter over the years. of course it's true, and of course it is not universally true. some fruits haven't gotten sweeter, but others have massively, like apples. but you're being kinda dumb by focussing on only one aspect. fruit is also less nutritious nowadays, having lower vitamin contents. fruit is also specifically being bred to not be bitter, which is horrible, because those bitter parts were really good for you and had anti-cancer properties. of course you'll scream like a child now, but the reason for all of this is capitalism. the same lowest common denominator I talked about earlier. this kind of fruit just sells. it is grown with truckloads of pesticides and insecticides. it is grown almost exclusively with nitrogen fertilizer, which results in lower vitamin contents. it is often harvested too early because it'll be shipped, meaning sugar content has to be very high, since the fruit will often be eaten unripe and hasn't unfolded its full potential. a little quote to keep it scientific:
While some fruits such as
apples have been bred for sweetness over the years, the vitamin content of fresh fruits has also changed over time. Michael Pollan has
stated, “For plants to create all these interesting phytochemicals that nourish us, they need a complex soil. So crops that get lots of nitrogen fertilizer and little else tend to be less complex and less nutritious.”
While this oversimplifies and generalizes a bit much, it is fair to say that over the years
fruit has declined in vitamin content due to depleted soil resulting from agricultural practices to grow foods hardier and faster, rather than focusing on nutrition.
Breeding for sweetness does not necessitate removing nutrients, which is a separate problem related to soil and agricultural practices. However, breeding plants to produce both fruit and vegetables that have lower levels of protective phytochemicals (the plant protective compounds that contribute so mightily to taste – many of them bitter) has happened as a consequence of increasing their dependence on pesticides to protect them from bacterial and fungal pathogens.
Maybe just start buying organic fruit, older, local cultivars, help those farmers save their heritage, because that's the kind of tradition that I stand up for. That's the kind of tradition worth protecting, because there is great benefit in it. There is a reason why we have biodiversity: Because some vegetables grow better in this climate than in others. Some cultivars developed specifically here, but are being supplanted by highly engineered crops that just fare way better in capitalism. Until you accept that fundamentally this is not a problem of the individual, of a lifestyle, but a problem absolutely inherent to global neoliberalist capitalism, this discussion can't go anywhere-
You keep repeating this fantasy about "eating what your ancestors ate", but are you actually doing it? Are you researching cultivars, breeds of domesticated animals, are you researching food history, are you buying organic, do you know your local farmers, do you talk to them, support them politically or otherwise? Maybe instead of fixating on this weird idea that you've already set up in your head, first really try to understand what people ate in your region 200 or even 100 years ago. It's difficult as **** to find out, even here in Germany where things of that nature usually are well documented. People 100 years ago didn't have weird ass palep diets, they didn't hate seasoning nor flavor, they didn't fetishise eating only one thing at a time. I feel like your goal and mine are actually so close, but ideology is driving us apart completely. All those things you mention, I've researched them, too. I've come to many of the same conclusions. I just think your way of going about it is really dumb and unhelpful.
If you want to have a good, healthy relation to food, then learn how to cook. know the people that grow your crops, that breed your meat, know where it comes from, ask questions. support biodiversity, support local and ecological farming, support small-scale operations.
I know where I can get apples that aren't sweet at all, apples that even some people with allergies can eat. they're old cultivars, but not that old. a hundred years tops. when my mom buys a chicken or a rabbit, she can pick it out, be told its name, be fully conscious that an animal is about to be slaughtered for her. the farm is very small and only about 5km from where I grew up. isn't that kinda similiar to your fantasy? I couldn't imagine living any other way, having any other relationship to food. food is not something to abstain from, something you should be scared of, food doesn't have bad intentions. if you change your habits around food, and not just what you eat, everything else will follow accordingly.
