Combat-Ready Kitchen
Americans eat more processed foods than anyone else in the world. We also spend more on military research. These two seemingly unrelated facts are inextricably linked. If you ever wondered how ready-to-eat foods infiltrated your kitchen, youall love this entertaining romp through the secret military history of practically everything you buy at the supermarket. In a nondescript Boston suburb, in a handful of low buildings buffered by trees and a lake, a group of men and women spend their days researching, testing, tasting, and producing the foods that form the bedrock of the American diet. If you stumbled into the facility, you might think the technicians dressed in lab coats and the shiny kitchen equipment belonged to one of the giant food conglomerates responsible for your favorite brand of frozen pizza or microwavable breakfast burritos. So youad be surprised to learn that youave just entered the U.S. Army Natick Soldier Systems Center, ground zero for the processed food industry. Ever since Napoleon, armies have sought better ways to preserve, store, and transport food for battle. As part of this quest, although most people donat realize it, the U.S. military spearheaded the invention of energy bars, restructured meat, extended-life bread, instant coffee, and much more. But thereas been an insidious mission creep: because the military enlisted industryahuge corporations such as ADM, ConAgra, General Mills, Hershey, Hormel, Mars, Nabisco, Reynolds, Smithfield, Swift, Tyson, and Unileverato help develop and manufacture food for soldiers on the front line, over the years combat rations, or the key technologies used in engineering them, have ended up dominating grocery store shelves and refrigerator cases. TV dinners, the cheese powder in snack foods, cling wrap . . . The list is almost endless. Now food writer Anastacia Marx de Salcedo scrutinizes the world of processed food and its long relationship with the militaryaunveiling the twists, turns, successes, failures, and products that have found their way from the armed forcesa and contractorsa laboratories into our kitchens. In developing these rations, the army was looking for some of the very same qualities as we do in our hectic, fast-paced twenty-first-century lives: portability, ease of preparation, extended shelf life at room temperature, affordability, and appeal to even the least adventurous eaters. In other words, the military has us chowing down like special ops. What is the effect of such a diet, eatenaas it is by soldiers and most consumersaday in and day out, year after year? We donat really know. Weare the guinea pigs in a giant public health experiment, one in which science and technology, at the beck and call of the military, have taken over our kitchens. From the Hardcover edition.The microwave oven is a descendant of the magnetron, an electromagnetic oscillator that made radar much more efficient ... Licensing the technology a decade later, the stove manufacturer Tappan (now part of Electrolux), and appliance giantanbsp;...
| Title | : | Combat-Ready Kitchen |
| Author | : | Anastacia Marx de Salcedo |
| Publisher | : | Penguin - 2015-08-04 |
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