by Pandora » Fri Feb 17, 2017 8:27 am
Perhaps is not so much a matter of snobbery as of qualitative discernment. This, of course, depends on the goal in mind, such as nutritive value of food vs pleasure/aesthetic value of food. Ideally, a balance of both would be good, but I see a lot of emphasis on pleasure value of food, at the expense of nutrition. And why do we have to eat? (another can of worms) You can see this heavily pronounced in Western societies: we are surrounded by foods, all kinds of foods, but we are still suffering from malnutrition. So, now, we have the supplement industry taking over, and I think this is just stupid, especially for 1st world countries. Even our foods are nutritionally poor and have to be enriched; we have to add vitamin D to our milk, calcium to our orange juice, niacin to our flour (because we prefer finer texture of flour over nutrition), and iodine to our table salt. And now, with our addiction to supplements, we are adding random nutrients to random foods..why not? Can we not get adequate nutrition through our food? Would that not be ideal? Do I need my yogurt to be fortified with 20g of protein and fiber and lab produced super bacteria? I'm not even touching on additives, flavor enhancers, and potential chemical fertilizers on which these foods were produced. I just came across a loaf of bread last week. One of the ingredients is calcium sulfate. That's gypsum. FDA seems okay with it, but do I need gypsum in my bread? I mean, I could just chew on my wall if I wanted some. But of course, the bread won't loose it's texture that way, and will last much longer. At times, I am thinking there are people in Africa who subsist on drinking buffalo blood and milk that get better nutrition than people in the West that are constantly spending (a lot of) money on nutritionally empty food. Food has become art, even though it has to serve a primary purpose of fueling human body, but that is now being taken over by 37 billion dollar supplement and bullshit marketing industry. Food is now for mainly for pleasure, physical and psychological. Open any tourist brochure for things to do in a any given city and you'll notice that the biggest section (in some places the only one) is a list of places to eat (and shop) since apparently this is how we prefer to spend our leisure time.