Food Facts: Past, Present, and Future

Food and how humans relate to it are endlessly discussed by the news media. Shelf Life Advice has put together the following short survey of mostly recent ideas and advice to help people cope with the challenges, temptations, and ethical dilemmas that food presents us with.  If you love meat but hate the idea of an animal dying to be your dinner, two of these pieces have somewhat comforting content. If you want to lose weight, the other two offer valuable tips. Shelf Life Advice presents just a brief taste (excuse the pun) of the information in each source. To locate the entire article or interview, click on the link or (for the ones not available online) go to a nearby library, bookstore, or news stand.  Okay, let’s dig in.

“Burgers from a Lab: The World of In Vitro Meat”

This intriguing title belongs to an NPR radio interview with Michael Specter, the author of a New Yorker article entitled “Test-Tube Burger.”  Specter is a science writer who went to the Netherlands and North Carolina to find out how scientists are progressing in their effort to make meat in a Petri dish.

In case you also want to try, here’s the procedure.  Just take a few cells from the muscle of the animal you want to eat for dinner, let’s say a cow. The cow won’t miss them and will certainly prefer this to dying for your dinner. Place the cells in “a nutrient mixture” and let them grow until they become many cells, then tissue, and, eventually a whole muscle. After the muscle has been electrically stimulated for awhile, you can make yourself a hamburger. For a more detailed and scientific account, I recommend Specter’s 7-page New Yorker article. 

How long will it take before consumers will be able to purchase lab-made ground beef?  Specter predicts about ten years. You may want to grocery-shop for some alternative entrées to tide you over. Right now, your dinner is an almost invisible group of cells.

Perhaps you’re wondering why scientists are working on this process. Two good reasons: lab-made meat would be more humane, and it would be better for the environment. 

Please don’t call the finished edible product “artificial meat”; it’s real meat even though it started life in a lab.  Think about it: test-tube babies are real babies, aren’t they? 

You can read or listen to this interview.  By the way, while you’re at the NPR website, you might want to read about other “meaty” topics the station has covered, such as meat-eating furniture and meatless Mondays.

“Food for Thought: Meat-Based Diet Made Us Smarter”

Now, you vegetarians don’t get irate.  This piece isn’t saying that today’s meat-eaters are smarter than you are. This is an anthropologist talking about the distant past.  The point being made here is that it takes longer to digest plant food (especially if it’s raw) than it does to get nutrition from meat. Also, meat has more nutrients than an equal quantity of plants, so humans (or semi-humans) had to eat more plant food to get the energy (calories) they needed to function well. When humans became meat-eaters, they then had more time to develop their minds and figure out how to create tools. Moreover, when they discovered fire and learned how to cook their food that made their diet even easier to digest and gave them more time and energy to devote to other matters, such as evolving mentally.

So, are today’s meat-eaters smarter than vegetarians?  Aiello doesn’t say that. But, happily, we’re all a bit smarter than our ancestors who chomped on raw potatoes. 

You can read or listen to this interview with anthropologist Leslie Aiello by clicking on NPR website, and, for the audio, clicking on Listen to the Story.

“Pick your ideal diet”

The June, 2011 Consumer Reports has a great article for the failed dieter looking for the perfect diet program to fit his/her tastes.  The article compares 7 programs—Jenny Craig, Slim-Fast, Weight-Watchers, Zone, Ornish, Atkins and Nutrisystem on these 4 areas:  what you eat, support, exercise, and price.  

You can probably locate the issue at your local library, bookstore, or magazine stand.

Mindless Eating—Why We Eat More than We Think

The title above is the name of a book by Dr. Brian Wansink.  The meaning of the title would be clearer if he’d written “…more than we think we eat.”  He is NOT saying we spend more time eating than thinking.  That can’t be true since we think every waking minute and many more while asleep.   The point  Wansink is making is that when we eat we are usually doing something else at the same time—talking to friends or family around the dinner table or on the phone, watching TV, maybe even having breakfast while driving to work.  We don’t pay attention to how much we’re eating (except for those of us on Weight Watchers).  The result is that we eat more than we realize and often too much. 

Wansink has done studies showing how easily people are misled about the quantity of and calories in the food they’ve consumed. Many examples are given in an interview with Wansink that appeared in the May 2011 issue of the Nutrition Action Health Letter (published by the Center for Science in the Public Interest.) Here are some of them. Moviegoers ate more popcorn when they were given a bigger bucket. Subjects ate more of a food if it had an appealing name. They ate more cheese if the wine they were given with it was good.  (If the wine was bad, people concluded the cheese would be also.) The same amount of food appears like more food if it’s on a smaller plate, so subjects given a smaller plate ate less of the contents. Moreover, subjects underestimated to a greater extent the calorie count of a food that had a health “halo” than one that didn’t (a Subway sandwich versus one from McDonalds).

To read more about Wansink and mindless eating, go to Choices, a publication of Blue Cross/ Blue Shield, by clicking here.  Another alternative is to purchase his book, Mindless Eating.  It will give you answers to the question of what people can do about overeating that result from eating mindlessly. 

Related article on Shelf Life Advice:

To reach “The Benefits of Slow, Mindful Eating,” click here.

Source(s):

New Yorker “Test-Tube Burgers” May 23, 2011

npr.org   “Burgers from a Lab: The World of In Vitro Meat”
http://www.npr.org/2011/05/18/136402034/burgers-from-a-lab-the-world-of-in-vitro-meat

npr.org “Food for Thought: Meat-Based Diet Made Us Smarter” by Christopher Joyce
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128849908

Consumer Reports “Pick your ideal diet” June, 2011

Choices (published by Blue Cross/Blue Shield) Q&A Brian Wansink, Ph.D.

Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, Dec. 2010.
https://www.bcbsri.com/BCBSRIWeb/choices/qa/brian_wansink.jsp