8. Why the Food Industry Tries To Stop You From Ever Tasting Healthy Bitter Foods
The food industry has poisoned your mind against bitter taste, but here’s how you can reclaim it and your health.
Food used to be easy. It grew. You ate it. You had it or you didn’t. Today, even if you have it, you’re not sure if it should be eaten. There’s all sorts of nutritional divisions decked with metaphorical horns or halos. Processed. Genetically modified. Organic. Sustainable. Each exists on a sliding scale where higher prices are yoked to being healthier.
If you’re interested in a disease-free life, it’s worth understanding our changing practices around agriculture. Food used to be the first drug prescribed for most ailments, but what you eat today is a far cry from what it used to be. Carrots were purple. Bananas were stumpy. Corn resembled grass. As we changed from chucking spears to chucking sickies, food got a new job description, and the way it’s now grown warrants a serious performance review.
Shifting Paradigm
In medieval times nature was believed to be inherently corrupt. It needed to be corrected. Tamed. To be good, was to achieve dominance over the natural world. It’s an odd view, considering you are a product of nature. However, this medieval thinking remains. You’re told food isn’t as good as medicine. This may be true for deathly ailments, but it may also be because you can’t patent turmeric. There’s no patient profits without patents when you let food be thy medicine.
How adverse to food therapy is the current medical system? A lot. A paper in The Lancet Planetary Health looked at 24 studies that stretched over 6 years and found nutrition was insufficiently incorporated into medical education, regardless of country, setting or year of medical education. Visit a doctor due to sickness and you’re told to go easy on the fast food if you’re big unit. Often, a low-nutrient-high-calorie diet isn’t even seen as the cause of sickness. However, if you’re smart, you’ll appreciate that regularly eating processed foods that have their own jingles, is like getting double bounced on a trampoline - super fun until you get hurt.
The Modern Solution
Medical doctors have limited nutrition training. Instead, you’re invoiced for a prescription. Keep doing what you’re doing. Book another appointment once your symptoms are unbearable. You’ll get fresh medication prescribed. This approach is like missing a payment on your Tesla and having it drive itself back to the lot. When people were asked who they were most likely to get their nutritional information from, they said their doctor, not a nutritionist or dietitian, found a study in the Australian Journal of Primary Health.
You may as well ask the kid at the Apple Genius bar why your car’s hazard lights aren’t working. This means it’s wise to do your own research, starting with the origin stories of your food. We’re able to grow and eat foods from all over the world but have lost many healing food varieties. Why is this worth noting? The food industry has soured your relationships with many bitter foods and gently steered you towards less healthy alternatives.
Cucumber in Question
The cucumber you know today, isn’t the flavor-neutral veggie that strikes fear into jumpy cats. Almost 3,000 years ago cucumber skin was thick and bitter thanks to high levels of compounds called cucurbitacin. These green slugs needed bitter sheaths to prevent pests eating them. Whether you were a Greek, Roman or Indian, cucumbers filled bellies and were the kind of medicine that got a shout out in the Bible
Old timey cucumbers had imperfections. Burps. Spiky skin. Dryness. New varieties were selectively cultivated to be less bitter. The skin became wafer thin. Little kids loved them. They were no longer medicine. Instead, they were a low-calorie food for anyone looking to loosen the belt buckle. This common food has changed to grow profits and likes. These were not nutrient driven alterations, which is like Dracula getting out his grave and asking for some chips with his stake.
Corny Tales
Think about popcorn’s origin story during your next Marvel blockbuster. It didn’t metamorphose from a lightning bolt. Humans took a bitter, wild grass, called teosinte, and transmuted it into big juicy cobs. The grasses with the chubbiest kernels were planted again. Those with skinny kernels were eaten and never replanted. It made sense. Calories were hard to come by in ancient times. V1 corn were grass seeds that would starve the common Hobbit. Farmers cultivated corn until it was fat, yellow, and full of so much sugar we could use it to sweeten other foods.
This has come at the expense of other foods that could be more nutritious or climate friendly. A report by Biodiversity International found three quarters of the Earth’s food supply comes from just 12 crops and five species of livestock. That stat is a food security risk and despite your supermarket’s vegetable aisle resembling the garden of Eden, it’s lost thousands of juicy options. This is thanks to people’s aversion to bitterness and the monocultured farming practices that value taste above nutrition.
Taste For Extinction
As farmers tried to grow the sweetest apple, the older varieties fell by the wayside. This is Newtonian physics at play. Action. Reaction. According to the USDA’s Census of Agriculture farmers are growing fewer types of crops than they did just 34 years ago. Roughly 100 years ago, people grew 7000 varieties of apples. Today, 6000 of those varieties are totally extinct to the point where just two species account for 50% of the entire apple crop. Their findings aren’t a one off.
A report by the UN Environment Programme found the global food system is now a serious driver of biodiversity loss where agriculture threatens 24, 000 of the 28, 000 species at risk of extinction. Over the course of 80 years, we’ve lost 93% of variety in our food seeds. To illustrate this, in 1903 we used to have access to 4088 species of peas. Today we eat just 25. And we’re happy. Most of us believe there was only ever one type of pea. Lettuce. Melons. Tomatoes. They’ve fared no better. In some cases, we started with 544 types of cabbage and have just 28. Great if you hate these Demogorgon doppelgangers, bad if you love unusual sauerkraut with your hotdog.
Changing Tastes
Our kaleidoscopic agricultural practices aren’t just thanks to changes in tastes. Deteriorating soil is an issue. A paper in Journal of the American College of Nutrition compared data from 1950 to the data from 1999 that related to 43 vegetables and fruits. They discovered declines in the amounts of protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin, and vitamin C. The list goes on and, like the quality of Steven Seagal movies, almost everything punches below the belt. Soil quality has deteriorated so dramatically that in 1950 you could meet your vitamin A RDI with an easy two-peach serve. Today you’d need 53 peaches. That’s many unwanted calories for the same nutrient fix.
Why does it matter? Well, a paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found plants with some of the highest levels of healthy bioactive compounds tend to be naturally bitter or astringent. Sadly, this bitterness is often seen by consumers as a plant-based toxin. As such, the debittering processes, via selective agriculture, means most foods now taste great. The price paid is a lost a portion of their disease fighting prowess. If you suddenly enjoy a new brand of kale, there’s a chance you aren’t getting the full benefits from it because their bitterness was farmed out of it.
Economic Truths
You can’t blame farmers for growing food that sells, or they’d risk ending up as a character in a Steinbeck novel. However, we might be lesser for it from a nutritional standpoint. Sadly, this has meant that we tend to have less dietary variety with each generation. Just four crops are starting to dominate the world’s agricultural sector, found a paper in the journal PLOS ONE. These big hitters are wheat, rice, soybeans, and corn. Sprinkle a little economics atop your corn cob and it means those items, in their natural or processed form, are likely to be priced cheaper due to their high supply rate.
This is a startling lack of food diversity. It may impact your health while giving you a physique that looks like it was made from Play-Doh by a blind kindergartener. A paper in the International Journal of Cancer found people who ate the biggest variety of vegetables and fruits decreased their body mass index, despite increasing their energy intake. In other research, it was found this variety even lowered the risks of cancer. Dietary variety makes you leaner and healthier for longer.
Longevity Unpacked
Who cares if people have never lived as you will today? Afterall, you’re almost a Highlander. Except, that idea needs to fall on your sword. When the health records of mid-Victorians (1850-1880) were examined, it was discovered they were fitter, healthier and lived as long as you, found a paper in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. Once a Mid-Victorian lived past 5 years old, they would most likely live to today’s average of 75 years. More impressively, they worked up until the day they died. They were not heavily dependent on the medical system like so many of today’s people.
The Mid-Victorian’s food was all organic. They exercised plenty, mostly for work, which offset their high bread and potato intake, but they ate plenty of foods you probably don’t. These were bitter foods we don’t like to eat as much of anymore. Think: organ meats, dandelion greens, leeks, and artichokes. Sure, there were some gaps in their knowledge. Tomatoes were poisonous and toothpaste was honey, but they clearly got a lot more things right than they did wrong.
The Greatest Show on Earth
Much of your food knowledge is an elaborate parlor trick. It’s executed with a touch so light it would make a Bond villain blush. The script is well tested. First, highly credible research emerges about a new food. Whether this research is funded by commercial entities that stand to profit from it is ignored by most story hungry journalists. The research tells you how this uncommon food item is mandatory for optimum health.
They’re not even sure how humans got this far without it. Hell, they may even slap a crazy label on it and call it a superfood. Acai. Goji berries. Coconuts. They all got the treatment where they soon appear on every grocery store shelves but in slightly altered versions of their potent natural form. Confused yet? You should be. Learning how to eat in the face of this narrative can be as confusing as learning to drive on the Arc De Triumph.
Outsmart The Supermarket
You know you’re being tricked. What next? You’re stood in front of organic, locally farmed broccoli that smells fresh. Yes, or no? Sure, buy it, but also try to break out of your nutritional comfort zone. Look for produce that sparks a little fear. Not terrified as if you were in an upside elevator with goblins coming out the walls. You should have the fear that you might worry you’ll waste your money on it or that you’ll hate it. Those are signs you need to eat it. Run toward that fire.
If you don’t recognize a vegetable or fruit, buy it. Learn how to cook it. A Wi-Fi connection means there’s no excuse for culinary ignorance. Challenge your supermarket choices. Don’t shop on autopilot. Be prepared to put some effort into your nutrition. Create a culinary journey that will generate a small sense of achievement. This will light up your brain’s reward system and this starts with unpacking your skewed perceptions.
Find Your Reference Point
Think about a toddler fresh off their first Halloween binge. To them a bright red strawberry may taste repulsively sour. Never sweet or juicy. However, if you got them to plant, or even pick, that precious strawberry and enjoy it as their first meal of the day then it would taste significantly more appealing. The effect would be magnified if they saw others enjoying said strawberry. There is no objective sense of taste. It’s completely subjective, despite what snobby wine judges would have you believe.
You’ll serve your longevity by adjusting your perceptions of foods by scripting a new narrative. Chat to the farmer selling dirt-covered spuds at your local market. Foods taste their best when you know where they’ve come from and how they are made, explains a paper in Food Quality and Preference. And if it tastes a little imperfect then you’ll probably like it even more suggests the research. Like David Bowie’s different colored eyes, it’s imperfections that make things remarkable. Especially for your tastebuds. If you ruthlessly expect your fresh produce to look and taste like a homogenized glass of milk well then you may as well start taking selfies with an X-Ray machine.
Chew The New-New
Health can’t be gained by becoming a culinary Indiana Jones. Examine most meals dished out by a nutritionist, you’ll get the stock standard instruction to eat lean animal protein, a carb source and side of vegetables. The ole chicken breast-brown rice-broccoli trifecta might be a powerful catalyst for weight loss or muscle gains, but only when it’s a departure from your usual diet of crispy chicken and fries.
However, even the healthiest options wear thin on your immune system and may challenge your ability to stick to the program because there isn’t enough variety. This mindset sets you up to hate the foods which tend to be the best for your body. Rather give your food a hero’s journey, where there’s a departure, an initiation then a return to the familiar world so you can act as the savior to your health.
A Fresh Sense of Taste
Try to eat one type of vegetable each month (or week) that your mom didn’t serve. To make progress when you train your legs with squats that you need to exercise just outside your comfort zone. You do more reps. You add more weight plates. You challenge your muscles. It makes you improve. Your diet plan is no different. Even if you’re at a healthy bodyweight that you’re happy with, there is always the opportunity for you to find novel foods that may agree uniquely with your system and activity levels.
Keep seeking new culinary options and you’ll give your body fresh ammunition to become better. Avoid the Frankenfoods that even mold wants nothing to do with. Sticking with same tired meat and three veg is a recipe for disease. It will leave you with a carcass that drags itself from one day to the next. Rather embrace exploration. Challenge the agricultural status quo. You’ll soon fill yourself with the new experiences that will see your body and mind thrive.
Bittersweet Tip 10: No Joke Carrot Tops
Carrot tops used to be something you received for free when you bought carrots. Today, you probably have to pay a little extra for them, unless you grow them yourself. Are they worth the price of admission? Definitely. Here’s what you get from including your carrot greens as part your whole taste diet.
6 times more vitamin C than the root
High in potassium, calcium and phytonutrients
A powerful digestive aid
Immune boosting properties
High levels of antioxidants
Carrot tops are easy to include as part of many dishes where they can add a depth of flavor to many dishes. Here’s five ways to enjoy them more often.
1. Include as part of any pesto
2. Dice and add to a stew, soup, or curry
3. Chop finely and include in bone broth mixtures
4. Dice, dry and add to a diuretic aiding tea
5. Add to a juice or smoothie that has the orange part of the carrot, oranges, and ginger