A Case for Processed Foods

Rather than insisting people avoid fast or processed food, how do we as a society make the food people already eat better?

Waffle House at night
In their book, the authors use Waffle House as a recurring example. (Photo by Simon Daoudi, Unsplash)

This is a summary of a story that originally appeared on Trinity College of Arts & Sciences.

Food can be many things to many people: comfort, memories, gathering, tradition. At the same time, conversations about food often revolve around nostalgia, about the scratch foods, just like our great‑great‑grandparents used to eat.

Though today’s processed foods often get a bad rap, Gabriel Rosenberg, associate professor of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies and History wants us to look at what he refers to as “industrialized food” in a more positive light.

In their book, “Feed the People! Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make It Even Better,” he and Jan Dutkiewicz argue that demonizing industrial food (food that is produced, processed, and distributed on a large scale) undermines our ability to build a fairer, healthier, more sustainable food system.

Rosenberg notes that the past was also plagued by malnutrition, a lack of food, and inequality. The book makes a case for improving the food system we already have, rather than fantasizing about one that never really existed.

He critiques nostalgic and highly naive sorts of accounts of rural places and rural people, pushing back against the belief that solutions lie in small‑scale, artisanal, farm‑to‑fork food products, which many restaurants tout today as better for us. By viewing food that way, they argue it forgets labor justice, ignores affordability, and treats the enjoyment people get out of eating food with suspicion.

Rather than insisting people avoid fast or processed food, they ask: how do we as a society make the food people already eat better?

To read more about this book and other faculty work, go to Trinity College of Arts and Sciences.