In today’s food industry, it’s hard to know what is actually going on behind the scenes. How much food is being wasted? What’s in your fruit snacks? Can you be overweight and malnourished? Learn about these 10 things you never knew about food…
10. Waste
Approximately 30 percent of all food produced is never eaten, and the problem is distribution. The world makes enough food to feed all its inhabitants, but the food doesn’t always get to the people who need it most. One U.S. family of four can waste up to 1,656 pounds of food every year.
9. Peppers, Chocolates & Tomatoes
Until 500 years ago, no one outside of the Americas had tasted chili peppers, chocolate or tomatoes. Many of these foods originated in the Americas and then spread to other countries.
8. Silverware
It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that Americans started to use forks to eat food. Before, they used hands, knives, and spoons to chow down.
7. Land Use
Around 40 perfect of the world’s ice-free land is used to grow crops for livestock and human consumption. Roughly one-fourth of the Earth is pastureland, which includes cultivated or wild forage crops for animals and open land used for grazing.
6. Gelatin
Gelatin is made from cattle hides and pork skins. The collagen of animal skin and bones are taken only from the hides of healthy animals that have passed strict inspections and are found fit for human consumption.
5. Fruit Snacks
Carnauba wax, a key ingredient in car wax that makes cars glisten, is also found in gummy bears and fruit snacks. It comes from the leaves of a carnauba palm tree, native to Brazil. The leaves are beaten to loosen the wax. Then, the wax is refined, bleached and sold.
4. Honey
Honey isn’t made from just flower nectar. If you didn’t guess already, honey is nectar and bee vomit. Bees use their digestive systems to process the nectar by swallowing and regurgitating it several times before finally leaving it in the honeycomb for evaporation and storage.
3. Supersized Sports Drinks
Soft drinks and sports drinks are now sold in huge sizes that can contain the majority of your daily liquid needs. Hydration varies depending on gender, size and activity level; however, you should aim to drink enough water (or a beverage of your choice) during the day so you are rarely thirsty and piss at least 1.5 L of colorless urine.
2. Corn Corn Corn
Corn products are in many more foods than you could imagine. Being a key ingredient in breakfast cereals, bread, potato chips, French fries, soft drinks and even most prepared foods. More than a quarter of the items for sale in the average grocery store now contain ingredients that came from corn.
1. Overfed & Malnourished
A person can be both overweight and malnourished if they fail to make the proper food choices. Too many fatty foods with high calories may lack the vitamins and minerals a body needs.
