Video 1 of Industrialization of Food. What would happen if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship? Food as ecological relationships, not as simple chemical compounds that can be manufactured into a bottle… In this series of 6 videos on The Industrialization of Food, Dr. Matt gets into the Real Issue of Food and Nutrition… This is video 1 of a weekly series of 6 videos so that you can implement this training in your life. Each video will premiere Monday morning at 7 central time…
Video #2 of our series on the industrialization of food. Whole food to refined food. Dynamic people understand that eating fewer processed foods means eating fewer industrial foods. Industrial foods are made using industrial methods, in laboratories with laced chemical ingredients. Factory farms provide a perfect example of such a method; in contrast, foods from the Agricultural Age are grown on a farm or herded on a ranch- just like when our ancestors hunted and gathered in the wild. We have used fire to cook for millions of years, and pounded our meat to tenderize the product; that is all well and good. In truth, industrial food (Twinkies and Wonder Bread) is the real problem, which no nutritionist denies.
This is Video #3 of our series on the industrialization of food. I’m Dr. Matt Hammett the host of this series on The Industrialization of Food. Last time we talked about how Whole Foods to refined foods caused white sugar to become the first fast food. I went into how our industrialization methods of getting grains and sugar took a healthy food and turned it into a toxic food. In this video, I’m going to talk about how food went from as Michael pollen put it, From Complexity to Simplicity.
This is video #4 in our series on the industrialization of food. In the last video in this series we talked about from complexity to simplicity and why Big Food saw it as a business opportunity and how that shifted from a complex variety of foods to just 4 seeds which is the root of the chronic illness plague and led us to sacrifice quality. So in this video, I’m going to continue that saga and talk, From Quality to Quantity.
While industrial agriculture has made tremendous strides in persuading macronutrients—calories—from the land, it is becom ing increasingly clear that these gains in food quantity have come at a cost to its quality.
Video #5 of our industrialization of food video series. From Leaves to Seeds.
It’s no accident that the small handful of plants we’ve come to rely on are grains (soy is a legume) ; these crops are exceptionally efficient at transforming sunlight, fertilizer, air, and water into macronutrients—carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. These macronutrients in turn can be profitably converted into meat, dairy, and processed foods of every description. Also, the fact that they come in the form of durable seeds which can be stored for long periods of time means they can function as commodities as well as foods, making these crops particularly well adapted to the needs of industrial capitalism.
This is the final video of our series on the Industrialization of food. From Food Culture to Food Science.
The last important change wrought by the Western diet is not, strictly speaking, ecological, at least not in any narrow sense of the word. But the industrialization o f our food that we call the Western diet is systematically and deliberately undermining traditional food cultures everywhere. This may be as destruc tive of our health as any nutritional deficiency.