I’m determined to stick around until ‘The Experts’ declare that ‘well marbled’ (remember that one, kids?) meat, rot-gut bourbon, and Unfiltered Pall Malls are essential to a long, healthy, and happy life.
3 things I will not compromise on: Whole Milk, Real Butter, and Real Vanilla.
I quit cigarettes and booze. I expect do die as a direct result.
There was a big TV news story here in Vic.Aus: The cheap milk producers were adjusting the milk fat by using skim milk.
Funcamentally, there are two way to adjust the milk fat: take some of the fat off all of the milk, or take all of the fat off some of the milk, then mix the no-fat milk back in.
To the shock and horror of the tabloid news program, major dairy companies were doing it the second way. As a consequence of which, one of the major brands is now promanately branded “Permate free”. Which I can’t help but read as “Milk free milk”.
Had fresh milk as a teenager. “Milk” here is 3.8%. Our fresh milk was 3.8% after you scooped the cream off.
Permeate. Why would you think of it as milk free milk? Permeate is a by-product of cheese making - it’s what’s left after the bits needed for cheese making are extracted, and is generally considered as a waste product. Add this by-product to milk and suddenly you’re making a litre of milk out of less than a litre of milk, and selling it for the same price as a litre of milk that was made from only milk. Milk producers claim they use permeate to regulate the nutritional composition of their product to counter seasonal variation. I’m sure that was the primary motivating factor, and the financial savings were an incidental windfall.
What’s wrong with the second way that we should experience shock and horror? Scotch and wine are blended all the time, too.
Yes. Also known as “skim milk”. They used to sell it, most people couldn’t stand it, but it identified a market which now served by something not as thin.
There are three methods of reducing the cream in milk down to the legal minimum.
(1) Mix water in. This, called “watering the milk” is not legal in some places.
(2) Take some of the cream out of all of the milk. (Traditional artisan method)
(3) Take all of the cream out of some of the milk, selling it for profit as cheese or cream, leaving something that is generally considered as having no cream left in it, and mix that back in.
If you take all the permeate out of milk, you are left with something that isn’t milk.
I don’t think supermarket milk is the same as the milk I had as a teenager, but I don’t think that the milk disingenuously labelled “permeate free” is the same as the milk I had as a teenager either.
I’m holding out until they declare fast food to be healthy. “A Whopper a day keeps the doctor away.”
But you don’t keep up the quantities in those proportions without the “processed” part. I’m almost tempted to say you can’t. If I’m limited to literally whole foods like dead animals, plants (including grain bearing plants) and eggs, with the power of my own teeth and hands (hell, throw in a chef’s knife and cutting board), I honestly don’t think I could make something as horrid as a Twinkie. I really couldn’t. And if I could, I would expend as much energy making it as I would take in eating it, and so it would be a wash.
I remember reading fantasy books as a kid that would teach about magic: the energy required to get something done is no different with magic; the magician merely uses some other energy to do it. And while that was of course fiction, I think food is perhaps a literal example of that. Hunting and gathering food takes a lot of energy, so if the foods you’re hunting and gathering are high in fat and sugar, who cares? Farming took the energy of animals and metals, and later fossil fuels, and using that energy created a surplus of food. And then highways and trucks and trains and factory production came along, and we used all that additional mechanical and chemical energy to invest into making food, instead of walking and pushing and reaching and cutting.
Now, I don’t like the word “processed,” either, because everything we eat is processed. Even if I’m shelling peas, that’s a process, that’s changing the plant from how it came out of the ground to discard the part I don’t want to eat, processing the plant into a food. So, semantically, I hate “processed,” and argumentatively, I would very much like a better definition or a different word.
I think to make it a meaningful term, “processed food” needs some sort of ratio of food value to eater’s effort in producing that food, and that unconsciously, that’s what most people really mean by it. Twinkies aren’t “processed” because they involved milling and mixing and baking…they’re “processed” because they arrive at your gaping maw with you having done nothing to it except open a package. (Although, by that description, so do apples. :dubious: )
I’m sure we all think peeling an orange is an acceptable amount of processing to have that “processed food” several times a week. Twinkies, not so much. There’s a vast swathe in the middle, though. Pizza? Pizza’s kind of middle-processed, if I make it in my kitchen from “scratch” - I’m not milking the cow and making the cheese, nor sowing, growing and milling the flour, after all, but I’m also cutting and chopping and standing and moving. Still doesn’t mean it’s an everyday food. If I made it less “processed”, by using vegetables that I grew myself and cheese that I made and flour that I ground by hand - well, then it might actually be an okay everyday food after all!
We have a name for husbands like you!
Which is…?
When it comes to health, not too many, including the experts, have that many concrete answers for us. For every study that suggests A, you can find plenty that recommend the opposite and say go with B, while others will recommend anything in between. All of us just kind of have to wing it.
Not convinced skim milk drinkers are in any significant danger either. I’m 57 now, and have been a heavy milk drinker, drinking whole milk until my mid to upper twenties, before switching over to drinking skim milk somewhat heavily for about the last 30 years, about 2-3 gallons a week. Over the last few years, trying to get it down to about a gallon a week, mostly out of concerns of the titanium compounds such as dioxide and sulfate they add in the skim milk to turn it white, and it possibly being a human carcinogen.
This article was interesting, and enjoyed learning more about the studies and will spend more time on it when I can make the time. I might compromise and switch over to 1% milk, but won’t be in any rush to do so. I know there are a lot of other studies to consider besides what is in this article.
I agree that no one should change their diet dramatically based on one piece of information. But there has been a lot of propaganda about low fat dairy for a long time now, and I want people to at least know that there are some serious cracks in that edifice.
ETA: As for the question of what defines processed food, I think we can make a distinction between the processing possible with tools humans have had for millennia versus those that have not been routinely used on food for more than a century or two.