Show paragraph

The elephant in the can is this:



"Of the 600,000 food items available in the US..."



This sophisticated argument about lipolysis might have usefully noted that in reality a huge proportion of that 600,000 scarcely deserve description as food. Issues of digestion, metabolism, benefit and damage relate also to the diverse additives for taste, fluffiness, and preservation.



Margaret Thatcher (before she became Prime Minister before she became Meryl Streep) as an industrial chemist showed the ice cream manufacturers how to make more money by adding air and emulsifiers. Prominent on the list of additives to dairy items to make them fluffy and now especially pervasive in anything labelled 'lite' is caraggeenen.



— despite this reality in medical science:



"Carrageenan-induced inflammation in the rat paw represents a classical model of edema formation and hyperalgesia, which has been extensively used in the development of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and selective COX1-2 inhibitors. "

http://www.jbc.org/content/279/23/24866.long



this carcinogenic inflammatory agent has approval as a food additive. Lots of other examples can be brought to the bar, as with this on-going war:

http://healthland.time.com/2012/05/30/fda-rejects-new-name-for-high-fructose-corn-syrup/



There is need for advocacy to:

- avoid processed foods generally; hunt for fresh, demand fresh, which demand might shift pricing of fresh more favourably (I am sure much consumption of non-fresh is because too hard, too expensive

- get public focus on 'food miles' - the impact of centralised industries and vast distances travelled by foods increases the need for preservatives and flavour enhancers

- work to improve the shopping and cooking skills of young people especially, not least because an increasing proportion have such limited home exposure to fresh food and cooking (recognise that the diminishment of such skills is a decline in civilisation)

- encourage community gardens and other home food production, not just for the probably modest direct food gains but also for the healing value of the social and physical exercise and the mind and lung opening effects of living in an ecology.