Pros And Cons Of Food Preservatives

When you look at the ingredients of a food, do you see a lot of ingredients you wouldn’t expect? Do you wonder how food lasts so long? Both of these are done through food additives. They add nutrition, preserve the product, maintain consistency, and retain flavor and color. But they are also mostly artificial. Before the 1800’s, people would mostly grow and process their food by themselves. It wasn’t until after the civil war that the majority of people started working in factories and needed food grown and processed elsewhere. This led to food needing to travel more. Which took longer before it got eaten. The processors started to add preservatives to all foods. They didn’t know it could be unhealthy so they heavily used them. Eventually the FDA was formed and announced that food additives could be poisoning society. Now, the FDA ensures the safety of food additives present in our foods. There are four types of food additives: nutritional additives, processing agents, preservatives, and sensory agents. Each has a different goal. Nutritional additives are used to add nutrients and vitamins to foods that normally wouldn’t have them. For example, in 1924, iodine was added to salt to reduce …show more content…
With the strict regulation from the FDA, food additives are beneficial. They allow for food to be more flavorful and last longer. We could not have unspoiled food without food additives because there isn’t enough farmland anymore, and it takes too long for food to travel to the consumer. Food additives are essential to maximize the little farmland left. On the other hand, food additives take away from the freshness of foods. They are the reason you sometimes can’t even pronounce the ingredients that are in your food. They can cause allergic reactions and sometimes illnesses. But the FDA does a good job monitoring companies and helps food additives to be an overall positive addition to