27 Mar 2014 Time for change in food processing conversation
Food companies need to change the way they talk about their work in order to enable the general public and members of the media to develop a clearer sense of the benefits that processed foods offer… so advised keynote speakers at an IFT symposium last week in Chicago.
David Freedman, contributing editor to The Atlantic, and Trevor Butterworth, editor-at-large of Stats.org, declared that “the public has run off the rails when understanding food and health”.
Freedman called for consumers to embrace science and engage in more open conversation when it comes to processed foods. Food processing fundamentally changed the history of the world, eradicating hunger, malnutrition, and foodborne illnesses, but many consumers are defining health narrowly, thinking mainly in terms of local and unprocessed products. They disregard the fact that it’s not possible for all consumers to eat only local foods and have created the notion of a pastoral ideal of life long ago that didn’t actually exist.
People “really like a good story”, he said, and in this story, food processors can sometimes be labeled the villains. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Freedman urged scientists to integrate themselves more into the media, providing journalists with more insight into their work, so that they become less likely to report on wild, outlying theories. He emphasised that the only way to change the story is by providing better products that are both healthier and good-tasting.
“Don’t let the knuckleheads get you down,” he said, urging scientists to have courage and continue to communicate the benefits of processed/packaged foods.
Describing the “fantasy of the land of plenty”, Butterworth also explored the romantic notion of the pastoral state. He took the audience on an anthropological journey through the origins of food history, revealing just how far the human population has come from the days of scurvy, plague, and famines. “Cooking is what distinguished us from the animals,” he said.
Thanks to the ability to process food, life expectancy increased and people grew taller. In addition, the industrialisation of food freed people, particularly women, from the drudgery of constant food preparation, allowing them eventually to enter the workforce. Everything is interconnected, he said, and the way we live is all related to how cheaply and easily we can access food.
Like Freedman, Butterworth called for a change in the way the food industry talks about itself. He described the need for scientists to tell a more engaging story about what they do, something they might accomplish by bringing in people who can talk about technological developments in an interesting way.
People are “tired of endless cynicism,” said Butterworth. “The younger generation wants a journalism of solutions. You need to fuse the generation of who knows how to write with the generation passionate for good change. If you don’t do anything, you only guarantee more of the same.”
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