(no subject)

[pensnest]

I came upon an alarming article last night about the differences between UK food and USA food.

https://joinzoe.com/learn/uk-versus-us-food?utm_source=uk_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_week45&utm_content=2-45-2

Comments

[altamira16]

Foods are different in all sorts of places, even in different regions of the country. Bread is actually very tricky.

Some of this may have to do with "Who is the huge local bakery that bakes this stuff?" too.

Because there are food allergies in my household, we have to read ingredients carefully, and there are Oreos that do not contain certain allergens in the US that contain those allergens in other nearby countries. It is wild.

Almost every bread has some warning that says "Processed in a facility with ALL THE FOOD ALLERGENS" where that last bit is usually the list of allergens either in the baking or packaging area.

[pensnest]

It must be nightmarish having allergies to cope with. It feels as though bread, of all things, should be a Safe Food. But I've looked at ingredients lists here (sometimes) and ick. It's good to have a breadmaker.

[yarnofariadne]

This is one of those things I have to tell people over here when they ask me why I'd want to be here rather than the US. There are just so many little things that people in the UK don't think about and take for granted.

[pensnest]

The EU as a whole exhibits a lot more care for the eventual consumer and the US a lot more care for the money-making producers. And post-Brexit I am sure the Tories would like us to head towards the American style, which horrifies me.

I saw a YouTube comparison between Big Macs in the UK and the USA, and it was quite instructive.

[yarnofariadne]

Definitely. It's going to get so much worse and people really had no idea they were putting us in this situation. Ughhhh.

[watervole]

There's a reason we avoid processed foods in this house. And have an organic veg box. Thank heaven my husband is a good cook (and that we have time for him to cook). I know exactly what is in 95% of what we eat.

And that's almost certainly why I'm slim, and apart from sciatica, pretty healthy.

[pensnest]

I know that when my daughter was a teenager, I started to cook about 95% of our meals instead of using ready made, and she lost half a stone without changing anything. Ingredients good, pre-made bad!

[watervole]

Says it all, really.

[brandywine28]

Yeah, I was all set to make a joke about how much we Americans love our sugar, but really, it's The Man who loves it and who's relentlessly pumping it into us. It's almost impossible to get away from it.

Food colorings -- my God, I could write you an epic poem of frustration and skin rashes. I'm highly allergic to Yellow No. 5 and I've had to learn the hard way that if something is yellow-ish or orange-y in color, it does not need to go in my mouth. And there's a lot of orange food out there!

[pensnest]

It is kinda horrifying how many places sugar and fat creep into, when they have no business there. It is so much nice to cook actual ingredients, but that depends on having the time and the knowledge to do so.

[turlough]

That's scary reading! I thought the list of additives allowed in food were too long here!

[pensnest]

I suppose one has to allow for some additives, when foods are made in advance and eaten when we've bought them, rather than made and set in front of us at once! But it's alarming to see how many things allowed in the USA are forbidden in Europe, when the science is *available*.

Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

If you can't pronounce it, you probably shouldn't eat it.

Re: Well ...

[pensnest]

That sounds like a good rule! I've been paying a lot of attention to Tim Spector's ideas of late, and one is that food should have no more than five ingredients (I think). So if you pick up a tasty-looking thing in the supermarket and get bogged down in an interminable (and unpronounceable) ingredients list, put it back!

Re: Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

The best food rules are simple.

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

"If it came from a plant, eat it. If it was made in a plant, don't."

"Half your plate should be vegetables."

"Eat the rainbow."

"You can eat all the junk food you want, as long as you make it yourself."

Regarding ingredients, it depends on what they are.

If there's only one ingredient, it's usually safe. Up to five is a good range. The fewer the ingredients, the safer the food is likely to be.

However, some great recipes are complex. It's not rare for an Indian dish to have between one and two dozen spices, usually carried by a base of cooked-down tomatoes and onions, plus chunks of vegetables, legumes, and/or meat. Italian vegetable or mixed seafood soups may have a wide range of ingredients all jumbled together, and ratatouille is frankly "chop up whatever's ripe from the garden." Just look to see if the ingredients are whole foods, or at least reasonable things you might have in your own kitchen like olive oil.

Conversely, one chemical can be enough to make something not-food. Broad categories of artificial flavors, colors, and preservatives are things my body often objects to. Most food colors are inedibly bitter to me. I had one friend who couldn't eat high-fructose corn syrup, and there went 95% of stuff in stores. O_O

I also like to look at foods and see if I can recognize the pieces. We get some frozen meals that I can look into and see corn kernels, beans, other vegetable bits, etc. This is a big improvement over stuff that's reduced to homogenous glop.

You might like my post on hippie foods.