Many people enjoy highly engineered food products as part of their diet. There are a number of different reasons why people choose to consume these highly engineered and processed food products instead of fresh foods. Some people love the taste of these products, while others are happy to tolerate engineered food to save a little money instead.
Whatever the reason might be for eating processed food products, it is important that you make an informed choice. Everyone deserves to know where the food that they eat comes from; as part of this, you should always understand where the ingredients themselves come from, and how they are processed into the food products that you see on the store shelves.
What are Engineered Foods?
Processed foods start out life as simple ingredients that are much the same as others; before these ingredients are processed, they are grown by farmers from around the world in greenhouses and fields.
These foods are then baked and prepared a number of different times until they are no longer recognisable as food products that have natural origins; these can vary in a number of different ways, but will generally end up being highly fatty and will generally be unhealthy.
What Ingredients go into Engineered Foods?
There are many different ingredients that can go into engineered foods, but the most common of these ingredients include:
- Food colorings and flavorings—these will usually be man made, as opposed to being naturally derived, although there are also some natural colorings and flavorings on the market as well.
- Palm oil—palm oil is cheap and
highly processed, and is grown in staggeringly large quantities for the purpose
of providing a cheap oil for use in the engineered food production process.
Palm oil is often renowned nowadays for the large environmental impacts that
palm oil production can have.
- Palm oil is primarily grown in countries such as South America, Indonesia, Malaysia, Ghana, and New Guinea. Typically, palm trees will be grown on an incredibly large scale in palm oil plantations.
- Sugar and salt—lots of highly
engineered food products will contain large quantities of sugar and salt, often
in order to mask other, less palatable flavors that the food product might
contain. This can make engineered food highly calorific and unhealthy to
consume.
- Salt is usually primarily composed of sodium chloride, that has been mixed with other chemicals in order to prevent it from sticking together. It is usually obtained through the use of either mining practices or by harvesting the leftover salt from rock pools that have been leftover by the sea. Salt can be harvested worldwide, although sea salt typically will come from regions with hotter climates.
- Sugar usually comes from large scale sugarcane plantations from around the world, although a smaller amount is also extracted from sugar beet plantations as well. Over half of the world’s sugar production comes from Brazil, with India and the EU coming in a close second for production levels.
These are just some of the most common ingredients and components of processed, engineered foods. There will, of course, be a large number of other ingredients in the recipes as well; these can often include wheat and grains, as well as a small degree of other, more expensive ingredients such as vegetables or meat (meat found in engineered food will often be of a poorer quality cut, potentially minced or diced up finely in order to mask an unpleasant bits of gristle or fat or grime).
Ingredients in engineered food products come from all around the world, and this means that engineered foods will often have a high carbon footprint. This, combined with the health hazards of eating processed foods, means that more and more people are looking to make themselves aware of what goes into the food that they are eating.