There's a great piece by Joanna Blythman on the ingredients used in shop bought Christmas foods. If, like me, you've ever looked at the ingredients list on a packet of mince pies or other Christmas goodies and wondered at the label, Joanna's piece offers some explanation.  As she says:

 

 

I know there are good suppliers out there and people making high quality Christmas foods for sale to the public, however, her findings would be true for most mass produced products and foods found at the supermarket.  Joanna writes in the UK, so not all of it applies here, but there are enough cross overs to make it interesting reading. The full article is here.

 

Wholegrains are a big nutritional buzzword at the moment. You'll see the term "wholegrain" emblazoned over packets of breakfast cereal, different types of bread, crackers, biscuits and snacks. However it's not obvious from any of these packets what exactly a wholegrain is and whether you should be eating them.

Grains are the seeds of grass plants, like wheat, rye and barley. Each of these seeds has several layers, including a fibrous bran layer, the germ and the endosperm. In a wholegrain cereal all parts of the original grain seed are retained. Which is beneficial because each of these different components of the seed has nutritional benefits. The bran layer is high in fibre, while the endosperm contains minerals, B vitamins, antioxidants and even small amounts of protein.

In contrast, non-wholegrains like white flour, white bread and white rice, do not contain all of the components of the grain seed - some are removed during the refining process. Which also means they contain a smaller range of nutrients.

Eating more wholegrains is associated with a reduced risk of stroke, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease. Commonly eaten wholegrain foods include wholewheat bread, wholewheat pasta, brown rice, corn, rolled oats. The general advice is to eat at least 3 - 4 servesm or 48gm of wholegrains per day, with a serving being equal to two slices of bread, or a cup of cooked rice/pasta/porridge or wholegrain breakfast cereal.

One word of warning - while many products advertise themselves as being wholegrain, some of them contain a disappointing amount of actual wholegrains. Check the ingredients list to make sure the product you're buying contains a decent amount of wholegrain.

 

If your great- great- grandmother went to the local supermarket, I suspect she wouldn't recognise most of the food on the shelves.

 

In just a few generations the food we buy has changed considerably. While today's supermarkets are full of packaged and processed foods, the choices available to you your great- great- grandmother were more limited. Her shopping basket would have contained more basic food stuffs, like flour, sugar, eggs, bread, vegetables, meat, milk, with few processed foods either available or affordable.

 

Now, instead of being scarce and expensive, we take packaged foods for granted. Oven-baked potato wedges, microwaveable ready-meals, low fat snack bars, high calcium milk are on many peoples' shopping list.

The need to maintain shelf-life and stability has also changed ingredients. Stabilisers, emulsifiers, flavours, colours, gums, leavening agents, preservatives, anti-foaming agents are all used to stop food from going bad, or separating out and looking strange.

In tandem with this, over the last two decades there's been a growing disquiet about the consequence to health and planet of all this food processing. Not everyone thinks food technology equals progress.

Between what's in the supermarket and your local farmers' market, organic vs conventional, home-cooked vs take-away, low fat vs natural there are a lot of choices. Food is no longer just food.

Photograph by Tobias Mandt.