As I walk around the dining hall searching for food, I often have a difficult time deciding what I’m going to eat. You see, I don’t care as much about what the food looks like or about having a variety of choice at my disposal. What I do care about is that the food I’m putting in my system is healthy and of good quality. Unfortunately, it seems like today, good quality food is hard to come by, especially in an age when fast food is so popular. I always like to know what ingredients are in my foods. It can be a bit tiresome to be the type of person that pays attention to what you eat, solely because there are so many artificial ingredients in today’s foods. After you educate yourself, you can’t help but be concerned about the disgusting amount of chemicals in our foods.
I wonder if any of us would think to go to a chemistry lab and digest chemicals straight out of a beaker. I doubt any of us would voluntarily do this, so I wonder why we do this to a lesser degree with the foods we eat. It makes sense to eat food, but I can’t say the same for ingesting so many chemicals. When you become an informed consumer, you are instantly surprised by the amount of artificial colorings and flavor enhancers in your foods. From high fructose corn syrup in our “fruit jelly,” to the more obvious “yellow 5 lake” in our M&M’s, chemicals and preservatives are very present in the foods that we eat. There are so many additives and preservatives in our foods that it’s difficult to rationalize what purpose they serve to us. The only point of these “food enhancers” is to ensure that food manufacturers can produce large quantities of food for less money.
In turn, these foods can be sold and stored for longer, keeping consumers happy. They are making a cheap product and gaining all the profits, while we get served horrible food that will have negative effects on our health. But don’t be discouraged; there are better alternatives! You can avoid digesting all those chemicals and still be able to eat equally delicious versions of the foods that you love. It’s not about not eating desserts or candy. You can have all of those things. I love having brownies or cookies, as long as the ingredients are real. Be aware of the ingredients in your foods. Choose foods without artificial ingredients.
Maria Gellepes is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences and a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. She can be reached at mg887@bu.edu
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
