Tag: food

Supermarket

I am enchanted by the miracle of supermarkets. Others complain of high prices, spot shortages. They dream of olden days when “heritage vegetables” had more taste, or “Paleolithic diets” fortified our ancestors, or …

Until recently, most people ate spare, monotonous diets and famine was always lurking right around the corner. I never envy those ancient times .

Four unrelated inventions have been necessary, along with all the other ignored benefits of modern times. Rapid reliable bulk transportation, refrigeration, manufacture of fertilizer from air, mechanized grain farming. Without all these, food would be limited, expensive, and supermarkets could not exist .

Some pine for old street markets and the local baker and butcher. Those indeed have their charms. And yet _ well, at almost any time I can go to a supermarket, shop for all kinds of fresh or packaged or “ready to eat” food, and be out very quickly with all I could possibly want at a price which in the grand scheme of modern life is almost negligible .

I try to see it as a medieval peasant would. I love to be astonished at the possibilities and displays. It is almost a vision of the garden of Eden or heaven itself. But I admit that like a lot of folks I often take it all too much for granted and even complain when I should be rejoicing .

Ultra Hyped

A current bugaboo is worry about “ultra processed” foods. On examination, this label turns out to mean to have about as much meaning as anything with “turbo” in the description. “Ultra” used to be defined pretty synonymously with “extreme” or even a little more extreme than regular old extreme. But this connotation has apparently eroded just as much as the other older term, simply slapped on headlines and attention seeking studies to grab interest by shouting about new worries .

” Ultra processed food” is a perfect case in point. On a normal dial indicating, for example, speed, the indicator would range from stop through slow, moderate, fast, to insanely fast or ultra. But the equivalent food dial would label everything under 10 or 15 mph as okay and anything above as “horribly fast.” A fairly useless guide .

So now “ultra” is being slapped on everything bad in the same way “new, improved” used to be attached to anything good. I’m aware that word meanings and especially connotations mutate frequently, so there is little to really get annoyed at. It’s the ridiculously set binary division that is truly crazy .

I will continue to use my own food dial which runs approximately from raw, prepared, lightly processed, heavily processed and – yes – ultra processed. And not to be too worried about occasionally enjoying the “worst” which are – after all _ sometimes very delicious and many of which whole populations have been eating for decades .