Food Processing: Modern Times

Raw starch can be filled with colours, flavours, sugars, thickeners, gelling agents and emulsifiers to create artificial food, which tastes consistent but does not have anything of value.

The person who eats this highly processed ‘food’ isn’t eating anything really but is fooling the taste...

• Pop soda started being manufactured in Britain about 250 years ago, as a way to make freshwater last longer for sailors on sea voyages.
• Water injected with carbon dioxide was marketed as medicated water that could prevent diseases like scurvy.
• The carbonated water...

Most food processing done for centuries has been to soften the food, give it some shelf life and add flavour. Techniques like pasteurisation or salting also make food safer to eat and allow people to take it with them while travelling.

Some processed foods, however, bear little resemblance...

• Pepsi-Cola was first sold in the 1890s as ‘Brad’s Drink’, promoted as a digestive aid. Even the name was similar to Pepsin, a digestive enzyme. The drink was heavily processed and didn’t even contain pepsin or kola nuts.
• Coca-Cola was flav...

Customers demand consistent taste, smell and colours from their foods, giving food manufacturers reason to adapt their products to have consistency at the cost of authenticity.

The required taste and texture can easily be created from extracts, making food cheaper and faster to make in bu...

• Similar to soft drinks, most processed foods would be unrecognizable to what they were a few decades ago.
• Breakfast cereals hardly have any grain in them, just like the chocolate we have today is highly processed and refined, miles apart from what the Aztecs relished cent...