What’s for dinner today?

CEBU, Philippines - The human diet has changed so much in these past few decades. To a large extent, it is still based on meats, vegetables, fruits and grains – but many of these food groups now come in new compositions and forms.

For instance, now we have meatless meats. And the supermarkets explode with a wide variety of “fabricated” foods, selling food stuff that are the results of new production and processing technologies.

The basic shape of things on the dining table, however, has not changed much. People are not yet downing little multicolored pills and calling it dinner.

Instead, we have such foods as “ham,” “bacon,” “steak,” and “sausage” made from soybeans. It is estimated that direct meat substitutes, called extenders, compose about 22 to 25 percent of today’s total meat consumption, and the rate is rising. Extenders, when added to real meats in hamburger, tastes like the real thing.

We also have a new kind of wine, one that has never seen a single grape fruit. It is processed from whey, a dairy by-product formerly discarded by cheese makers as waste. Also, a new kind of milk is now filling up supermarket shelves. It’s been drawn from cows fed with biologically-treated forage that allows for vegetable oils to reach their milk sacs intact and then replace the saturated fats. It tastes like old-fashioned milk, but has much lower quantities of the saturated fats that are believed to contribute to heart disease.

These modern developments come amid growing health threats facing us today. More than ever, we are more particular now about our health and wellbeing. But what actually prompted this interesting change in our diet is economics, not health concerns. It is just cheaper and more ecologically sound, for instance, to utilize high-protein content of a pound of soybeans directly than to cycle it first through cattle, which need up to about nine pounds of vegetable-protein feed to produce a single pound of meat.

Well, yes, it is more healthful, too. Vegetables, as we know, are more healthful than most meats. In the right combinations, vegetable products provide all the proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins and trace elements needed for good health, without the potentially harmful saturated fats and cholesterol contained in animal products.

Food technologists have been quite successful in matching the flavor of real meats. Hamburgers extended with 25 percent soybean protein taste as good as 100 percent pure ground beef. No one has yet been reported returning a juicy hamburger sandwich to the fast-food counter because the thing tastes a little less beefy.

Fabricated foods are not synthetic or artificial foods. Bread is a fabricated food. It is made from ingredients of other natural food forms that were processed and then put together. Yoghurt cannot be said to be less nutritious because it is a fabricated food. A kind of imitation cheese made with corn oil has been on the market for a long time now, alongside non-dairy creamers, using polyunsaturated soy oil, that mimic the taste of real dairy. There are also simulated fruit purees and concentrates based on seaweed and gelatin.

Today’s poultry growers are raising chickens that reach the size of turkeys, and turkeys the size of ostriches. It costs less to produce a small number of large birds than it is to produce a large number of small ones. Poultry is now used in sausages, a healthier alternative to the usual pork or beef.

In some parts of the world, like in the Middle East, giant greenhouses are producing vegetables all year round, beating the harsh desert climate. These vegetable “factories” have no need for fertile soil. The desert sand is enough since nutrients are dissolved in water and sprinkled on the growing plants. A few inches down, the ground is lined with plastic, to prevent seepage of precious water. Only 10 percent of water is needed than would otherwise be necessary in an open field.

Moreover, the environment inside these technologically-controlled farms is sterile and self-contained, therefore requiring only minimal amounts of pesticides and fungicides. They turn out many times the amounts of crops possible in natural surroundings. And the toxic-residue level on the crops is way much lower compared with that of the traditional produce.

With these modern food innovations, our meals today can be much more economical, much more nutritious, without the slightest difference in taste. It takes, however, for us to make the right choices. The old, less healthy fares are still around. It’s so easy to slip when deciding what to have for dinner.