Processed food is now widely seen as a great evil. When Mars took the progressive and transparent step of announcing some of its because of high fat, salt or sugar, the reaction matched this view.
“All processed foods are bad”, “Once a week – how about never”, “Why would you eat these once a week, it is so easy to make your own using fresh ingredients and 100 times healthier”. Many respected commentators echo this. “You will never become obese eating natural home cooked foods,” wrote one.
This troubles me. Don’t get me wrong, I love fresh food and cooking from scratch, but I love facts more. The “natural is good, processed is bad” rhetoric has become unthinkingly accepted. For example, tomato-based pasta sauces are often described by scaremongering natural bloggers as packed with sugar – around , . This is misleading.
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I do not know Dolmio’s formulations, but I would guess that about 5 or 6 grams of refined sugar are added per jar, with the rest coming from tomatoes, tomato puree, onions and garlic. And the only major processing is heating the sauce to kill bugs or spores that could spoil the food. Is heating an evil process? Don’t we do this in our kitchens every day?
It’s what, not where
I have cooked a lot of Italian food and I always add a little sugar to tomato sauces to balance the acidity. That is what manufacturers are doing. In most factory pasta sauces there is considerably less total sugar than in those I make at home or the ones I used to make in restaurants. I can’t defend all food manufacturing – there are products that are nutritionally poor – but I will defend jars of tomato-based pasta sauce.
And when people attack all processed foods, is that what they really mean? Do they mean flour, , rice, couscous, cashew nuts, dried fruits, seeds, vinegars, sea salt, spices, pasta, milk and cheese? These are all processed in some way. Do they mean all tinned goods? Everything frozen?
Food is not good for you based on where it was produced. Nutritional value depends on what it consists of, not on some magical story of its provenance. Natural does not necessarily mean healthy, processed does not necessarily mean unhealthy. Obesity involves poor food choices. If you took away convenience food, people would still make bad choices.
If the natural movement, politicians, health professionals, journalists and chefs continue to distance themselves from all convenience food, they will distance themselves from real, time-poor consumers and never change a thing.
