"Real" Potatoes vs. "Fake" Potatoes

One food that I frequently now eat in its "fake" form is mashed potatoes. This is a very easy food to make in its fake form compared to its real form. For the most part, all you have to do is add a few ingredients and heat it up. This fake version is a pretty close substitute for the real thing. The food looks very similar. That is, white, fluffy, and soft. The taste and smell are also very comparable to the real thing. The fake food does not provide any extra nutritional benefits. However, it is a very close equivalent in nutritional value to the real foods. This can be rare for packaged and processed foods, but potatoes are an exception to some extent. The fake version claims to be better than real potatoes because it is much easier and quicker to prepare than going through the whole process of making real mashed potatoes.

I switched to the fake version when I started cooking in college. I did this because it is much more convenient and easier than making real mashed potatoes. Instead of peeling the potatoes, then boiling them, then mashing them all together, and adding milk, butter, etc..., just heating and adding a few ingredients is much easier. I do believe that I will return to eating the real food in the near future. This is because there is no replacing good, "real" mashed potatoes. I would like to go back to the real version eventually.

In Sandy Swarc's blog she writes about processed foods and how they are not real. She says that they are manufactured version of food and lack essential nutritional benefits that real foods contain. She compares food processing procedures from the past to what we now know as "food processing" which contains chemicals and other unhealthy things.