– the whale, the elephant and the hippopotamus – are all vegetarians; they don’t eat hamburgers, chips or crisps but they get fat. The whale is hugely fat – it is covered in fatty blubber – but most whales eats only plankton (which would no doubt qualify for the five-a-day portions of vegetables and fruit we are told we must eat). It is fat because it eats lots of plankton, it grazes continuously, it’s the whale’s lifestyle. It is not fat because it eats food containing a lot of calories. A person who also continuously nibbled food all day long would become fat even if he grazed on fruit and vegetables. A person who sits in front of the television eating bags of peanuts (a good food) is more likely to become fat than one eating the occasional hamburger.
There is often confusion between so-called junk food and fast food. A pizza can provide an excellent meal even if it is likely to be a little heavy on fats, whereas a cherry tart that took hours to make is likely to contain more carbohydrate – even before the cream has been added to increase its fat content. Neither is junk, and both contribute food essential for the nourishment of the body.
So what is junk? I suppose the nearest one comes to a substance that is not nourishing is water. Nevertheless, a fluid intake of about two litres a day (some of it as water) is essential for survival. Without salt we would all die. We need fat, protein and carbohydrate. Even fibre, which contributes so little towards our essential nutritional requirements that it could be considered a ‘junk food’, has a part to play in digestion. The lettuce and cucumber salad we are told we must eat every day to prevent us dying prematurely is made up of over 98 per cent water, while most of the rest is fibre and contributes little of nutritional value. We all know of children who have refused any salad or green vegetables and have grown up to be long-lived, healthy adults. Lettuce and cucumber would qualify for junk-food status but for the small amounts of water-soluble vitamins and antioxidants that they contain. Celery is said to require more energy in the eating than one gains from its consumption – that might qualify it for the label ‘junk’, but there is no evidence to suggest that it is in any way harmful.
Processed Foods
Since the junk food title makes no sense the food zealots have lined up another culprit in their search for something to ban, it is ‘processed food’. Why processed food should be bad is not clear as it is difficult to find out exactly what they are. Since we eat relatively few foods without cleaning them, cooking them and flavouring them, it is difficult to see what particular processes are considered to be a health hazard. Those foods that are partially prepared in some way by the food industry are no different from those prepared at home although their culinary treatment is probably better controlled. The food we eat in restaurants is certainly processed but is it therefore bad? Do the food police seriously believe in some sinister plot by the food industry to introduce dangerous or harmful substances into the meals during the preparation process? Most evidence points to the meals prepared and served at home as being more likely to cause a health problem, such as food poisoning or obesity.
Certainly, some classical methods of preparation for preservation, such as pickling and salting of meat and the preparation of some bacon, introduces nitrates and salt, which in great excess may be injurious to health. Modern food technology has allowed us to avoid an excess of nitrate and salt in preserved food. All the preservatives used today are well tested and harmless even in 100 times their concentration in any food. Almost all have stood the test of time and none has ever been linked to any health hazard.
Fast Foods
What exactly are fast foods? It seems that they are bad for you but since no one claims to know what slow foods would be like it is difficult to see what it is that causes the harm. Some of the fastest cooking I have encountered was the cooking of scallops in a wok in China. The actual cooking time was under one minute. They were delicious and seemed to be without any danger to my health. Would they have been better for me if they had been cooked for ten minutes? Fast food is such a meaningless term that one has to question the authority of those who bandy it about as a form of verbal shorthand to conceal their personal dislike of foods such as hamburgers, pizzas and hot dogs. It displays a food snobbery that is so unjustified that it needs to be disguised behind a wall of meaningless jargon.
Reclaimed Meat
Whenever I carve a leg of lamb I feel saddened that I cannot cut decent slices as I get near the bone. Often this meat goes to waste. How much better it would be if it could be ‘reclaimed’. It is perfectly good meat. Fortunately, when an animal is butchered, the meat that is left on the carcass, too near the bone, or in too small an area for it to be cut off to make good butcher’s meat, can be recovered by high pressure techniques. This meat is termed ‘reclaimed meat’. It is perfectly good, healthy protein and has long been presented and eaten as corned beef, Spam and doner kebabs. However, when the same reclaimed meat is used by the food industry for mass catering it becomes an object of disgust. The same people who today sneer at the use of reclaimed meat tell us that in wartime Britain, when Spam and corned beef formed a major part of our protein intake, the population was at its healthiest.
It is clear that there is no such thing as junk food. It is a product of non-scientific pressure groups that, out of ignorance or prejudice, try to persuade us we are on the brink of a health catastrophe. The problem is not with the food we eat, but with the lifestyle of ‘junk eaters’.
BY STANLEY FELDMAN
THE MYTH: Non-organic foods are covered in harmful pesticides.
THE FACT: One of the pesticides deemed ‘safe’ by organic producers carries a warning that it is harmful to fish.
As I look back to my childhood, it seems that every summer’s day was sunny and filled with joy. I cannot remember it raining so hard that it spoiled a day out in the country. The food tasted better, the tomatoes were juicier, the strawberries tasted sweet and succulent and the peas that came from the pods were so delicious that many were eaten raw before my mother could cook them. I realise that my memory is highly selective – there must have been rainy days, rotten tomatoes, sour strawberries and worm-infested peas, but somehow things today never seem quite as good as they were in our youth.
It is the same rose-tinted nostalgia that is used to promote organic food. The cult of natural ‘organic food’ is based on a belief that, while the sun may not always have shone in days gone by, the food was better and healthier before the advent of modern farming and horticulture, when the crops were liberally fertilised with manure from animal faeces or rotting vegetable waste, in the form of compost.
This belief has been energetically reinforced by the scare stories of the eco-warriors who have blamed every ill – from heart disease and cancer to global warming, pollution, less biodiversity and the rape of the countryside – on the perceived evils of modern farming.
As soon as one spurious claim is disproved another scare is invented. So vociferous and well funded is the propaganda that they have caused many otherwise sensible people, and some government agencies, to embrace the organic bandwagon, although no one has produced any evidence in its favour. By scaring the public, the organic lobby has created a billion-pound market in the UK for food that is up to 40 per cent more expensive than that produced by conventional farming and from which it is indistinguishable.
The term organic food is in itself misleading. The separation
