Look, I like the fact that people don't starve. That poor people can get the nutrients and vitamins they need. Everything in the industrial food revolution was designed to make food cheaper for consumers. But there's a cost to that too. And early onset diabetes, heart failure for people in their 40's and other health issues are only part of the price.
It's not chemophobia - at least not for me. It's the breaking of the marketing we've been sold that cooking is hard, that cooking is very time consuming and that prepared industrialized food is just as good for you. As for the bread example, it isn't bread. And it could only be labeled bread after these manufactured lobbied government and the FDA in the 1940's to allow it to be called bread.
Yeah, there's a lot of snobbery around slow food and natural food. A lot of that is class distinction I assume and it's annoying. But I don't think you need to buy that kind of stuff. Get the vegetables that aren't organic. Buy meat that isn't "free range". But by all means buy quality ingredients and learn to cook for yourself a couple meals a week.
>People used to be very happy about those additions in the past, when they could relate to more "natural" food and its problems.
This makes no sense at all. People were happy for the convenience and sold the lie that cooking is hard and a waste of time when you can just buy this processed food and eat it right now.
Oh, I wasn't disagreeing with you. I think the stuff's important to have. The fact that nutritious, long-lasting bread of unprecedented quality is so astonishingly cheap and ubiquitous is a miracle of the modern age.
My personal theory is that it's a combination of conspicuous consumption ("but supermarket bread is for poor people"), plus a deliberate attempt to push more expensive products with higher profit margins --- mass produced bread is now so cheap that the margins must be tiny. The cheapest loaf of Chorleywood Process bread from Tesco (one of the big UK supermarkets) is £0.40, which is about 50 US cents:
http://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/details/?id=258742688
Meanwhile, go upmarket to the equivalent instore bakery loaf, and you're spending a pound:
http://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/details/?id=255809172
That's baked from frozen dough in the supermarket itself rather than cooked at a central bakery, which is going to legitimately push the price up, but it's still over twice the price for what is nutritionally the same stuff (compare the two tables above). Even the ingredients lists are almost identical. I think it's still Chorleywood Process, too, although probably from a different batch of dough...
(I'm a bread junkie. I like nice bread, and am willing to pay for it; and you know what? Those one pound loaves above are pretty good. I wouldn't buy the prepackaged loaves, though; they've been sliced, and nothing ruins a loaf more than preslicing it. One day I want to see a loaf of really cheap supermarket bread, unsliced, straight out of the oven. I suspect it would be pretty good.)
(Chorleywood Process, BTW: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-13670278)
> It's just that a lot of us these days have different values than the people who designed the bread (and a lot of the people who continue to buy the bread), which means that what we think makes good bread is not the same thing as what they think makes good bread.
That's a fine point, but then again a lot of us these days have the same values as those who designed the bread. Why are we being pushed so hard to reject them, with arguments mostly bordering on chemophobia?