Food Additives: Pros, Cons, and Some Ideas for the Future
Food Additives: Pros, Cons, and Some Ideas For The Future
America and indeed much of the world lives off of foodstuffs to which substances have been added to achieve some desired effect. In many ways it is the by-product of industrialization, rapidly expanding populations, technological advances, and changing consumer demand and expectations. It is now an undisputed fact that the foods which we eat on a daily basis are largely processed. By processed, in our contemporary day and age we refer not only to simple changes applied to the food with commonly found natural substances as in the pre-industrial era, but to more complexly engineered changes developed from the designs of food scientists in far-off labs. On the whole, there is a very significant amount of processing done to our food between the points at which it is taken from nature as an ingredient, to the point that it reaches our mouths at the table. There are literally thousands of various additives which have been discovered and developed to alter our food. (Wikipedia, “Food additives). How then is it that we take this processing for granted? Why do we ignore such great alterations to the very stuff which we rely on for nourishment and survival? It is largely because of the fact that much of the alterations made to our food are invisible to us as well as the fact that most Americans have been born into a world in which food processing and production on a mass level has been commonplace in our social environment. The relationship between human beings and food is a primordial one. The question now is whether we have gone too far with chemical additives and whether we should begin to scale back or even cease to pursue the use of such additives any more in our processed foods. This paper will examine the pros and cons of food additives, in order to come to a conclusion about whether the costs of additives outweigh the benefits, and how society should approach their use in the future.
America and indeed much of the world lives off of foodstuffs to which substances have been added to achieve some desired effect. In many ways it is the by-product of industrialization, rapidly expanding populations, technological advances, and changing consumer demand and expectations. It is now an undisputed fact that the foods which we eat on a daily basis are largely processed. By processed, in our contemporary day and age we refer not only to simple changes applied to the food with commonly found natural substances as in the pre-industrial era, but to more complexly engineered changes developed from the designs of food scientists in far-off labs. On the whole, there is a very significant amount of processing done to our food between the points at which it is taken from nature as an ingredient, to the point that it reaches our mouths at the table. There are literally thousands of various additives which have been discovered and developed to alter our food. (Wikipedia, “Food additives). How then is it that we take this processing for granted? Why do we ignore such great alterations to the very stuff which we rely on for nourishment and survival? It is largely because of the fact that much of the alterations made to our food are invisible to us as well as the fact that most Americans have been born into a world in which food processing and production on a mass level has been commonplace in our social environment. The relationship between human beings and food is a primordial one. The question now is whether we have gone too far with chemical additives and whether we should begin to scale back or even cease to pursue the use of such additives any more in our processed foods. This paper will examine the pros and cons of food additives, in order to come to a conclusion about whether the costs of additives outweigh the benefits, and how society should approach their use in the future.