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.
So I’ve literally done this twice before and so have several other people but here are sources on all of these, most of them fairly recent academic studies or otherwise the most up-to-date I could find:
- Organic food isn’t better for you: [1] [2] [3]
- Tracing food industry slave labor: [1]
- Healthier food is more expensive: [1] [2]
- Saturated fats (i.e. “junk food”) still provide needed energy, aren’t as bad as people thought: [1] [2]
- “Processed” isn’t synonymous with less healthy, because it means a lot of different things: [1]
- “Chemicals” also means a lot of things and many food components are misunderstood by the general public: [1]
- MSG is not harmful: [1] [2] [3]
- GMO’s are not dangerous to eat: [400 sources collected here]
“Processed” always gets me, it’s like yeah even that delicious homemade salsa you brought to the party is processed - the moment you took a knife to the tomatoes it underwent processing