Comment by chabska
6 days ago
> humans never ate until within the last ~50 years
Humans have been eating some of these for thousands of years. I know "extract" is a scary big scientific word, but most of the time it's just immersing the grain in hot water, strain it to remove the pulp, then boiling the liquid to concentrate it. You can separate the starch and protein from any bean or grain in your kitchen with some basic kitchen equipment and hot water.
That could be mostly true of some things like the starches, but with the caveat that the industrial processes used today aren't always the same as what was done traditionally or what I might do in my kitchen, and often involve new/synthetic/potentially toxic compounds.
Pea starch might be the most benign of all of these. I'm not making an argument that pea starch is bad either, just that it's not quite the same as peas, and isn't quite the same as home-made pea starch, and we don't really know if this is a problem.
For example, with pea starch, they use defoaming agents like siloxanes, as well as sulfur dioxide, sodium hydroxide, and others. And, because it's a concentrate of just part of the plant, you might get a heavier dose of pesticides or heavy metals depending on what part of the plant these bind with. (Sure, if you eat equal portions of each part of the plant, extracted, this factor would balance out.)
There's a spectrum of course with these things. Some things like refined oils might be far more harmful than the extracted starches based on the chemistry I've looked into. I'm not particularly afraid of pea starch but I just don't buy or eat processed food generally unless I'm in a pinch.
The dose makes the poison.
People weren't doing that at a mass scale before people figured out they could make money by increasing addictiveness, once technology was good enough.
I would like to point you towards the industrial processing of soybean into tofu, soymilk, tempeh, and soy sauce in Asia that has been going on for a long time.
Are people being intentionally dense here? We're talking orders of magnitude difference here. Widespread, worldwide transition to ultra processed foods, synthetic emulsifiers, synthetic flavors, etc (the ENNNs), supermarket chock full of things that can't be named food sold as food ("cheeses" that can't be sold as cheeses, etc).
There are tons of products where the base ingredients are at least 2 steps away from actual traditional ingredients. Sometimes (frequently) the base ingredients aren't even food, they're purely petro-chemical based. My dad used to joke that the same plant that makes ingredients for paint and tires makes articial flavors for food :-)
Bah, I withdraw from this discussion. It's full of people that can't see the forest (ultra processed food everywhere destroying people's health through its addictiveness) for the trees (technicalities about some ultra processed foods being available in the pre-industrial era, on a much smaller scale and in much smaller niches).