10.
Not Your Life Or My Life
But Shelf Life
Shelf life is the length of time that food and drinks and many other perishable items are given before they are considered unsuitable for sale, use, or consumption. In many countries, a best before, use by or freshness date is required on packaged perishable foods.
Packaged foods can undergo important changes, even while the material is being processed or while stored on the shelves. The determinations of the loss of vitamins and other nutrients in packaged foods was reported as early as 1938 by the Agricultural Experimental Station of Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College. The report revealed that a material loss occurs in twoweeks’ time and a very serious loss in one to two months time in certain stock rations.
Unfortunately, the primary focus of today’s food production and processing is shelf life and not the wholesomeness or nutritional preservation of the foods. Shelf life basically means the stripping foods of their valuable contents so much that even worms and microorganisms would not care to touch them.
Beautifully decorated shelves are meant for everything but food. Shelf life imprints are indeed yet another way to distinguish what one should or should not eat
Why would you want to put anything in your body that has been sitting on a shelf? Consider this - would you ever consider, even remotely, the concept of milking a cow and placing the fresh milk on a shelf and drinking it several days later? How about several months or even years later? Of course, you wouldn’t even think about it.
So, how about if you took that very same milk and did something to it so as to prevent it from naturally degrading and basically rotting, so that you could actually drink it months or years laterwithout having to worry about its adverse impact on health.
This is what the shelf life does to the food. The food thus stored may not contain toxic levels of bacteria but also it does not contain anything nutritious or good for your body in any way, shape or form. How about eating a piece of cardboard?
It’s easy and common sense.
If it’s fresh, whole, real, could be eaten as it is, it’s food and you can safely eat it. If it’s refined, processed, altered, hydrogenated, boxed, wrapped in plastic and hermetically sealed, well, leave it that way and don’t inflict it upon your healthy body!
Packaged foods can undergo important changes, even while the material is being processed or while stored on the shelves. The determinations of the loss of vitamins and other nutrients in packaged foods was reported as early as 1938 by the Agricultural Experimental Station of Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College. The report revealed that a material loss occurs in twoweeks’ time and a very serious loss in one to two months time in certain stock rations.
Unfortunately, the primary focus of today’s food production and processing is shelf life and not the wholesomeness or nutritional preservation of the foods. Shelf life basically means the stripping foods of their valuable contents so much that even worms and microorganisms would not care to touch them.
Beautifully decorated shelves are meant for everything but food. Shelf life imprints are indeed yet another way to distinguish what one should or should not eat
Why would you want to put anything in your body that has been sitting on a shelf? Consider this - would you ever consider, even remotely, the concept of milking a cow and placing the fresh milk on a shelf and drinking it several days later? How about several months or even years later? Of course, you wouldn’t even think about it.
So, how about if you took that very same milk and did something to it so as to prevent it from naturally degrading and basically rotting, so that you could actually drink it months or years laterwithout having to worry about its adverse impact on health.
This is what the shelf life does to the food. The food thus stored may not contain toxic levels of bacteria but also it does not contain anything nutritious or good for your body in any way, shape or form. How about eating a piece of cardboard?
It’s easy and common sense.
If it’s fresh, whole, real, could be eaten as it is, it’s food and you can safely eat it. If it’s refined, processed, altered, hydrogenated, boxed, wrapped in plastic and hermetically sealed, well, leave it that way and don’t inflict it upon your healthy body!
Issues Associated With Sell By / Use By Dates
There is tremendous confusion over actual shelf life of food. Each country has its own standards which they keep changing frequently. According to former UK minister Hilary Benn, the use by date and sell by dates are old technologies that are outdated and should be replaced by other solutions or disposed of altogether.
“Much of our food system depends on our not knowing much about it, beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner; cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it's a short way from not knowing who's at the other end of your food chain to not caring–to the carelessness of both producers and consumers that characterizes our economy today. Of course, the global economy couldn't very well function without this wall of ignorance and the indifference it breeds. This is why the American food industry and its international counterparts fight to keep their products from telling even the simplest stories–"dolphin safe," "humanely slaughtered," etc.–about how they were produced. The more knowledge people have about the way their food is produced, the more likely it is that their values–and not just "value"–will inform their purchasing decisions.”
~Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
This confusion is resulting in phenomenal wastage of precious food. According to the UK Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP), the Western countries waste a whopping 33% of their food production. A major contribution to this wastage is made by the supermarkets who throw away food according to sell by date even if it is in perfectly good condition. With a billion people starving in the Third World, supermarkets in UK alone are throwing away food worth £12bn every year.
But is the food within sell by date safe enough for human consumption? According to the WHO and CDC, every year in the USA there are 76 million foodborne illnesses, leading to 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths.
But is the food within sell by date safe enough for human consumption? According to the WHO and CDC, every year in the USA there are 76 million foodborne illnesses, leading to 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths.
You Can’t Judge A Product By Its Label
You need to differentiate fact from fiction when it comes to all the “healthy” labels out there. Spanning everything from “heart healthy” to “boost your child’s immunity,” these classic marketing ploys are just part and parcel for the food industry. And yet these companies wouldn’t get away with the games if their claims didn’t reflect conventional wisdom on some level.
The industry’s marketing tactics simply manipulate already strained, twisted messages about health and nutrition. The consumer is left to wonder what’s truth, half truth and bold-face scheme. Unfortunately, it’s never safe to judge a product by its label. In fact, if it needs a label at all, it’s already subject to questioning. The safest assumption is this: there’s always more to the story.
The industry’s marketing tactics simply manipulate already strained, twisted messages about health and nutrition. The consumer is left to wonder what’s truth, half truth and bold-face scheme. Unfortunately, it’s never safe to judge a product by its label. In fact, if it needs a label at all, it’s already subject to questioning. The safest assumption is this: there’s always more to the story.
“What is most troubling, and sad, about industrial eating is how thoroughly it obscures all these relationships and connections. To go from the chicken (Gallus gallus) to the Chicken McNugget is to leave this world in a journey of forgetting that could hardly be more costly, not only in terms of the animal's pain but in our pleasure, too. But forgetting, or not knowing in the first place, is what the industrial food chain is all about, the principal reason it is so opaque, for if we could see what lies on the far side of the increasingly high walls of our industrial agriculture, we would surely change the way we eat.”
~ John Robbins