40 Natural Foods Cook Books

In the video [being revised] we introduced some of the 40 Natural Foods Cookbooks displayed.

Exploring Influences of Marketing on Society

I read in an industry book that the cosmetic industry had a ten year plan in the 1960s to lessen expensive pigments contained in face make-up and replace much of the pigment with water. To sell the consumer on actually wanting more water in cosmetics instead of the more expensive “pancake” pigments took companies 10 years of promoting “the natural look”–yet it worked–it worked so well that many women in the 1970s decided they didn’t need make-up at all! It probably took another 10 years of marketing to increase cosmetic sales after the natural look became popular. Whew, that was close! Remember how strange it looked in the 1980s when magazines were bringing back ‘bright reds’ to faces?

My point? I’m wondering about the Natural-Foods-Movement beginnings. There may be some real health concerns, or some spiritual concerns, but did the soy industry have their own “10-year plan?” We now consume more of one of the largest US crops, soybeans in their different forms, than we did before the health-food and sushi wave. Many Americans eat tofu, soy-enriched processed foods, and soy-based faux meats, and everyone eats the multitude of soy in ingredients in many processed foods. Meat consumption is down. Soy plants are mostly genetically modified and plant life can be patented. Other probably easily discredited theories of mine could include being sold to buy less bread per package in the form of thin-sliced bread, anything with “less fat,” and whole milk being bad for you: after we became confirmed skim-milk drinkers, paying more for the extra process and leaving that terrible fat for other products, the culture’s consumption of milk declined, which speaks loudly about the success of the skim-milk campaign. Did the same happen with skim milk as with cosmetic pigments, milk’s timeframe being a slow start in the  1950s through to to the early 2000s? It went from “skim milk” to “no milk.”  In the 2020s people weren’t drinking much milk. There’s a [backpedal?] new study now that says the fat in whole milk doesn’t do the harm that we thought.  Whole milk now is said to have good cholesterol, so we can drink whole milk now. Whew, that was close!

The Natural-Foods Movement didn’t originate with the 1960s counter-culture. The Food and Drug Administration [FDA] began looking into problems of chemical preservatives in foods as early as 1862. In 1874 the adulteration of milk with water and chemicals was discussed by the FDA, along with experiments on the effects of arsenic and copper pesticides on plants and the possibility of harm to humans.

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