The stomach outside of your body 🔥

Without technology, the thin-skinned human is defenseless in every natural environment. Our muscles are pathetic, we lack sharp claws or super-senses. We survive by our tools and our brains.

The same goes for our guts. We can’t digest the plants naturally available to us, and our stomach acid is too weak to kill the bacteria in raw meat that isn’t fresh.

It is food processing, that has allowed the hyper-sensitive human tummy to conquer the wild, unlocking calories and nutrients from natures nastiest places.

Food processes we know and love

• Cooking meat over a fire

• Cooking starchy tubers (potato, yam) over a fire for the past 100K years

• Sun-drying the cyanide out of yuca/cassava

• Soaking and sprouting seeds to lower defense chemicals

• Sourdough bread

• Fermenting lactose out of milk, into cheese etc

• Nixtamalization of corn (shoutout MASA chips)

• Fermenting cacao into chocolate

• Fermenting cabbage into sauerkraut

Un-proccesed and ultra-processed

Today, we’ve ditched the perfectly processed foods of our ancestors for a lazy mixture of the raw plant matter and industrial chemicals generally intended to simulate the original processing method.

The legitimate method of processing a given food is slow and hard to mimic, and we’ve either figured out some way to bastardize and simulate it, or we’ve mocked the end product with industrial gums, emulsifiers and seed oils.

Trendy consumption of raw salads and seeds are completely out of touch with ancestral eating, and modern bread is nothing like the slow fermented sourdough of the past.

The modern diet is the worst of both worlds.

Consider the tortilla chip

True nixtamalization requires steeping the corn flour in limestone, and boiling it for hours. This breaks down cellulose, lowers phytic acid, destroys mycotoxins and activates key vitamins.

MASA Chips goes through this entire process, but Tostitos just dumps some limestone into the mix and hopes for the best (no boiling, etc)

Bread made with yeast and baking soda rather than sourdough, fake sauerkraut and pickles with added lactic acid, the list goes on and on!

Defining ultra-processed food

Ultra-processed food (UPF) is becoming a hot topic (we are doing our best), occasionally people will ask where the line is.

Personally, “I know it when I see it”, Wikipedia has some concrete definitions and guidelines here, but the way I’d think of it is the following:

If it’s impossible to produce in a low-tech home kitchen, it is ultra-processed food. 

UPF is convenient, long lasting and highly palatable and generally composed of a mixture of highly caloric industrial extracts (corn syrup, seed oils), preservatives, texturizers and dyes.

We have no clue what the long term effect of UPF are on humans, but if American health is any indication, it’s very bad.

Halfway back to basics

Humans thrive with just the right amount of food processing. It will take some effort to find, but most cities have a bakery that does things the right way, or a local farm that can make raw cheese properly.

Supporting businesses trying to make convenient snacks and prepared foods the right way is our only path to sanity. Vote with your dollars and the prices should come down as they reach scale.

It’s either that or IBS, the choice is yours.

🫡

Loosely related reading:

• Pandora’s lunchbox

• The Conquest of New Spain

• Potato

• Man-Eaters of Kumaon