Hey Gabe, Remember how I told you I was taking a class all about industrial food? We read a book called Pandora’s Lunchbox and at first I was wary it would be a book written with complicated language that I wouldn’t be able to understand. I was pleasantly surprised, but pleased, to learn that Melanie Warner wrote the novel with the average person in mind. It was easy to follow, which made it even more interesting to read. I’m writing you this email because we discuss food a lot and I learned a lot of valuable and thought-provoking information that I think you would appreciate knowing as well. Pandora’s Lunchbox is an investigative story all about the processed foods we’re consuming, mostly without realizing it. In an interview with PBS, Warner defined processed foods as “something that could not be made, with the same ingredients, in a home kitchen.” Packaged and fast foods have become an almost universal part of modern society to the point where they make up about 70 percent of the calories we consume. A good amount of what we eat has been engineered into modified scientific creations. Over the last century, advancing technology has revolutionized the American meal into chemically-fueled manipulated food products that hold little similarities to the food of the people of the past. In this day and age, it’s become almost impossible to avoid food chemicals and chemical preservatives. Even “healthy” foods contain unnatural additional ingredients. A good example of this is Subway sandwiches. Subway prides itself on being a brand people associate with being healthy and fresh. The ingredients lists tell a different story. Have you ever thought about how no matter what state you’re in, McDonald’s french fries taste the same? That’s because mass-scale food processing requires that all of the product looks and tastes the same every single time (12). To achieve this, the food is pretty much destroyed and then put back together with chemicals, additives and vitamins. Additives are natural or synthetic substances, like salt or citric acid, used in food processing to preserve, add flavor, color or texture. There are at least five thousand known food additives and one thousand “ghost” additives in addition to the unintentional substances that get added through processing that are often unaccounted for. One common food additive that the food companies use is sodium benzoate. You might recognize it as a preservative found in paint thinners. What you might not know is that it can also be found in a variety of products such as condiments, salad dressings, sauces, frozen foods, fast food meals and a variety of sodas. As early as 1911, a scientist named Harvey Wiley made an unsuccessful attempt to get this chemical banned from food. He conducted experiments in which he tested on human volunteers to demonstrate that the substance was dangerous. It proved to be poisonous and caused problems in the testers such as nausea, headaches and vomiting. The U.S. Department of Agriculture food scientists ultimately decided it was safe in small quantities. We’re still eating it in our food to this day. That is just one example of food companies putting substances in our food with little to no regulations. The traditional process is for them to submit requests to gain the permission to use new substances to the Federal Drug Administration, but most of the time this doesn’t happen. It’s basically a situation of the food companies determining something is safe until explicitly proved otherwise. The problem with this is that even if additives are deemed ‘safe” in small amounts, the amount an average person is actually consuming adds up quickly. The food industry tends to be reckless with the use of the word “healthy.” According to Warner’s research, “In 2011, the Prevention Institute, a public-health nonprofit in Oakland, CA, looked at fifty-eight products with on-package labeling identifying them as healthy and concluded that 84 percent of them didn’t meet very basic nutrition standards” (192). This can be very confusing to consumers who read cereal boxes boasting phrases like “high in fiber,” not knowing just how much sugar these products contain. There’s nothing healthy about most cereals, even the ones claiming to be “organic.” All of it has been processed in some way and all of the natural vitamins and minerals that they possess are synthetic due to being destroyed during processing. Warner refers to this as “an alphabet soup of manufactured vitamins and minerals” (58). At the end of the book, Warner talks a lot about cooking. In an additional reading we did for class,the author talked about how manufacturers in the 1940s began a push for more processed foods by attempting to make an argument based on value being placed on the housewife not having to cook. Warner says that over the last 70 years, home cooking in America has declined dramatically (205). You know that I don’t like to cook and that’s mostly because I don’t really know how. I’m a product of our generation-a group Warner calls the kitchen illiterate(207). I have never been keen on learning how to cook and it’s possible I’ll pass that trait on to my own children and the cycle will continue. In summary, Pandora’s Lunchbox is an uncovering of the industries that create most of what we eat that speaks about how they are partially to blame for the nation’s health crisis. However, Warner makes it clear that she doesn’t expect for people to be able to automatically give up eating processed foods after reading this book. In fact, she even admits to eating and feeding her children more processed food than usual while she was writing it. Even after knowing everything she knows about processed food, she still faces the same dilemma that countless Americans face every day. Sometimes the affordability and convenience of processed foods feels a little too good to pass up. In another reading called “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food,” the author speaks about how there are conscious efforts made by food companies to get people hooked on foods that are convenient and inexpensive. As Warner said, “Processed foods are designed to be irresistibly delicious and appealingly convenient, but the more you know about the story of food additives, the more hollow the appeal seems” (117). My main take away was that processed food is scary and the process to make it is even scarier. Does the book make me want to change my eating habits? Yes. Am I at a place where I can do that easily? I wouldn’t say so. Until American society is willing to get there, the least we can strive for is the ability to make the food industry less of a massive mess than it currently is. I hope you learned something. With love from your favorite sister, Hannah