Food Additives

Our friends from Auckland have been staying with us for the last 6 days. They have two children, roughly the same age as ours, so with four under sixes in the house you can imagine how our days could have revolved around mealtimes, snacktimes, hunger, etc.

However, our friend’s little boy has a number of food intolerances, mainly surrounding additives like preservatives and artificial colours and flavours. So our food choices had to be made very carefully.

We're not a family who usually has great stocks of chippies (crisps to you English readers!), burgers, sugary drinks and such like in our cupboards. Although we do normally stock up on a few treats when we've got visitors coming! But anyway, I thought we'd be fine serving up most things we normally eat. 

With the help of my friend, I went through our fridge and cupboards and pulled out everything that had these additives in them and I was fairly gobsmacked to find how much I had underestimated our consumption of food additives.

Vegemite, hummus, pesto, rice crackers, gravy powder, tortilla wraps, ham, dried apricots, mustard, sausages, margarine – all our staple foods had to go!

(Ironically, our sugary strawberry jam and our stash of chocolate were free of additives and ok to stay!)

The need for our food to taste more sophisticated, look more pretty and keep fresh for longer is a relatively new phenomenon. It’s only really arisen in the last 50 years, but it seems to have skyrocketed in the last decade or two. Thousands of additives have become so normal and commonplace in our lives that we very often don’t even realise they’re there. The food industry is a fairly profitable one, and is using these chemicals to keep costs down and sales up, but I just wonder at what cost to our health?

Anyway, the consequence is that our kids have pretty much been on a detox for the last 6 days! I can’t promise that we’ll be able to remove all additives from our diet from now on with immediate effect (as that would mean an awful lot of our food supplies would need to be thrown out), but I’ll certainly be checking my food labels a lot more from now on.