If your great- great- grandmother went to the local supermarket, I suspect she wouldn't recognise most of the food on the shelves.

 

In just a few generations the food we buy has changed considerably. While today's supermarkets are full of packaged and processed foods, the choices available to you your great- great- grandmother were more limited. Her shopping basket would have contained more basic food stuffs, like flour, sugar, eggs, bread, vegetables, meat, milk, with few processed foods either available or affordable.

 

Now, instead of being scarce and expensive, we take packaged foods for granted. Oven-baked potato wedges, microwaveable ready-meals, low fat snack bars, high calcium milk are on many peoples' shopping list.

The need to maintain shelf-life and stability has also changed ingredients. Stabilisers, emulsifiers, flavours, colours, gums, leavening agents, preservatives, anti-foaming agents are all used to stop food from going bad, or separating out and looking strange.

In tandem with this, over the last two decades there's been a growing disquiet about the consequence to health and planet of all this food processing. Not everyone thinks food technology equals progress.

Between what's in the supermarket and your local farmers' market, organic vs conventional, home-cooked vs take-away, low fat vs natural there are a lot of choices. Food is no longer just food.

Photograph by Tobias Mandt.