Over many years humans went from hunting for our meals and eating it raw, to preparing food and cooking food, to synthetically adding flavour by artificial means. The food industry is forever changing but is it for the worse, or is it for better?  At what point did adding preservatives and artificial flavouring benefit the nutritious value of foods to be consumed by humans? The answer to this is at no point was these artificial flavours and preservatives meant to benefit us in nutrition wise. The more synthetics and artificial flavouring and added substances in our food today takes away from the nutrition and health benefits from food.

          Most of the added substances to food are to make them appeal more tasty are more enjoyable to eat. Although these added flavours or substances might make food taste a little bit better than its pure form it often takes away from many nutritional aspects. By making the most desirable food according to taste is basically making the unhealthiest food to consume. Most consumers today don’t realize the preservatives and the synthetic flavours are a bad choice for your diet so of coarse they keep buying the food that is more tasty or cheaper (cheaper because of different preservatives).

          Like stated in the paper In Defence of Food by Michael Pollens, he mentions that in all of life animals judge whether the food is good to eat or not by their sense. Using artificial sweeteners and synthetics tricks are sense in thinking that the food is good for us when in fact it is the opposite. For example sweetener must be good because of the fact that it is a great deal sweeter then sugar but with much less calories, at least that’s what are sense of taste tells us but none of senses pick up the aspartame that makes it sweet and also is a carcinogen. So you have to ask your self in this case is it more important to consumer a couple less calories or consume something with little to no calories but is hypothesized to be a link to causing cancer in humans.

          One of the fundamental transformations Michael Pollens talks about in his paper is that food went from quality to quantity. So the production of food now doesn’t care about the quality \and nutrition of the products compared to the quantity and taste of products. In the eyes of the food corporations they see more money in a large quantity of food with less nutrition compare to a low quantity of food packed with nutrition. This is where the development of food really gets bad. A prime example is tomatoes soup… which ironically now a days have no tomatoes in them simply because it is cheaper to throw the nutritious tomatoes away and replace them with cheap artificial flavouring. When you’re at the point where your tomato soup does not contain any tomatoes you know the food industry really took away the quality and replaced it with quantity.

          Food industries even try to trick the consumers that are aware of the health flaws of certain foods. It is a known fact that brown bread is a much healthier choice than white bread. But also costs more to produce then white bread. Certain types of brown bread is just in fact the white bread mixed with molasses for a cost reduced way to make “brown” bread, but gives the consumer actually no benefited nutritious value that he thinks he’ll be getting when buying the bread. There is proof of this happening everywhere for example if you look at the Tim-Hortons nutrition guide there whole wheat and white buns have the exact nutritional values telling you when you have a whole wheat bun you should just have a white bun because they are identical besides in looks.

          Mass production is a very important part of the food corporations and industries today. They want to make as much product as fast as they can for as cheap as they can. When farming food it doesn’t matter how well you maintain your food it matters how quick you can harvest and obtain the food to the corporations. It doesn’t matter if you let cattle feed on grasses that are very health beneficial to the cows and the consumers of the cows, we now feed them special food to make them grow bigger and faster (but without the nutrients of the different grasses). Mass production takes away from the quality of the food.

          Through majority the food manufacturers tend to take away nutrition and implant their artificial flavours, synthetic flavours, and preservatives there are certain manufactures now that do try and give you the most nutrition possible. They try to give you fresh food or whole food compared to refined food that was described in the paper.  Also there are cases that the bigger manufactures are starting to keep whole grains and nutritious ingredients like that in the food to benefit people, although not all food industries do this it is a start that there are some that does. Another good thing that food industries are starting to do is labelling the healthier choices in food with a specific label so the buyer knows if he or she is making a healthy decision in buying a certain kind of food or drink.                                               

          Therefore just like it is stated in the paper In Defence of Food by Michael Pollens the foods today are lacking in their true nutritional potential. Through preservatives, synthetic and artificial flavours the food corporations replaced the quality of food with quantity of food. Although there are some corporations that offer healthy nutritious food most or the majority of food corporations alter the food for profit. These alterations is what takes the nutritional potential and value out of the food and it is why consumers are missing out when they buy from the grocery store.