How our Food Became Junk

Our food has been junkified. Over the last few centuries, mainstays of the human diet have been gradually replaced with junk: less nutritious, nastier versions of the same food, often being introduced without anyone noticing. Not a day goes by where I don't hear somebody concerned about this terrifying state of affairs.
Examples of "junk" food include refined sugar and white flour. Technology has made their production cheaper, easier, and nastier than ever before. What throughout history was an expensive treat is now usually multifold cheaper than the wholefood alternatives, and ubiquitously available.
For example, white bread - now the cheapest bread available - was once so costly and difficult to produce that it was restricted to the very wealthiest in society. On the other hand the peasantry, with no army of servants to work for them, were restricted to "rough" breads made of less refined flours and grains. Now, anything with the label "rustic" carries a premium. It's funny that yesteryear's "peasant food" is now the trendiest food around, and people of means will enthusiastically clamber for it!
Refined sugar also has a similar history. When it was first introduced to medieval Europe, it carried a price tag which restricted it, yet again, to the wealthy. Only by the 19th and 20th centuries was it cheap and plentiful enough to be readily available to the masses. And now, it is put in just about every type of processed product imaginable. The cheaper a food product, the more likely it is to contain refined sugar, no matter how unnecessary it's addition may be.
This sort of gradual "replacement" of foods is not limited to those two, however:

• Traditional fats like olive oil, butter, tallow and lard are replaced with Industrial Seed Oils, vegetable shortenings and margarine.
• The consumption of offal, the most nutrient-dense parts of the animal, is eschewed in favour of only the "white" meat.
• Meat in its entirety is now becoming unaffordable, while terrifying franken-foods are offered as paltry alternatives.
• Fermented products are rare, and usually pasteurised before sale.
  
  And the list goes on and on...

Only now are the staples of old coming back into fashion. Beef liver, extra virgin olive oil and grass-fed cultured butter is in demand again, as people recognise that something has gone very, very wrong with our food.

Not only are the types of foods we eat being substituted, but time-honoured ingredients with, identical names, are degrading in their purity and nutritional content. For example, flour just isn't the same anymore. The nutrient-rich stone-ground flour our grandparents knew as "flour" has now been replaced with nutrient-poor white, roller-milled, bleached flour riddled with toxic heavy metals and chemical residue. But still, this barely comparable product is still called "flour," so no one notices how much worse it has gotten.
And it's the same story with everything from the meat to the milk, from the vegetables to the fruit...
Our waistlines grow rapidly, as does the list of chronic health conditions we suffer from, and every recommendation made by health "experts" seems to only make us sicker. People at large are coming around to the fact that the nutrient-deficient, poisoned food we are being offered may have something to do with this precipitous decline in our health.
It's not enough to just complain about it, or sit in our homes scared about it. It's time to do something about it!
Support better farmers and food producers, buy better ingredients, make better food, and we WILL live a better life!

That's why we do what we do.
We're making a better world through better food.
The way it's meant to be!