fast-food companies and other food
processors drive down the cost of food
relentlessly and force economies of
scale and efficiencies or what are
called efficiencies on farming and I'll
just give me one example if you go to
McDonald's anywhere in the world you
will find french fries or chips as you
call them and you will find that they're
always made from the same potato the
russet Burbank potato this is a potato
from America that's unusually long and
and difficult to grow and but that's
what they want because when you're
making when you're McDonald's you like
those red boxes with a little bouquet of
very long chips it looks really good and
so they insist that all their potatoes
be russet Burbank and they further
insist that they have no blemishes at
all there's a very common defect of
russet Burbank potatoes called net
necrosis and you've seen potatoes with a
little brown line sometimes there's
spots that comes through it well
McDonald's won't buy them if you if your
potatoes have that and the only way to
eliminate that is to eliminate an aphid
and the only way to do that is with a
pesticide called monitor that is so
toxic that the farmers who grow these
potatoes in Idaho won't venture outside
into their fields for five days after
they spray and then when they harvest
their potatoes they have to put them in
these atmosphere controlled sheds the
size of a football stadium because
they're not edible for six weeks they
have to off-gas all the chemicals in
them so you see the desire for a certain
kind of chip leads to a certain kind of
Agriculture but the other thing on the
health side when I started learning
about nutrition about which by the way
much less is known than you might think
that the scientific understanding of
nutrition is still very primitive but I
learned that what mattered most about
one's health was not necessarily the
nutrients good or bad that you were
consuming or staying away from or even
the calorie counts but what what
predicted a healthy diet more than
anything else is the fact that it was
being cooked by a human being and not a
corporation corporations cook
very differently than people do they use
vast amounts of salt fat and sugar much
more than you would ever use in your own
cooking and the reason they do that is
those are three incredibly attractive
and incredibly cheap ingredients and
when they're layered properly as in a a
chip or you know various pastries and
and and forms of junk food they're
incredibly addictive and in fact people
in the industry they don't they don't
talk about addiction in the food
industry even though they traffic in
addiction they talk about craveability
it's the same thing and snack ability is
another term they use it's lovely word
anyway so I came to see that cooking has
a huge bearing on our health and in fact
there's been a lot of research in
America that shows that even poor women
who cook have healthier diets than
wealthy women who don't so you see the
usual class bias and the quality of diet
is over is overtaken by this fact this
key fact who's cooking your food
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