Inside Mel's Brain: Why is it that food isn’t food anymore?

This is a big topic, and I doubt I’ll cover all my thoughts in one little Mel’s Brain, but let’s start with this: compound interest.

If you’ve ever learned about compound interest, the biggest thing you pick up is that it’s all about delayed gratification. A good example is your super balance. You invest a little, it looks small at first, but the magic happens over time.

Say you invest $100 and it grows 10% per year. First year: $110. Big deal, right? Second year: $121. Third year: $133.10. Ten years later: $259. Twenty years: $672. Forty years: $4,526.

The lesson? Little changes compound. At first, they seem meaningless. But give it a generation or two, and the result looks nothing like where you started, and this is a positive example of it.

So what does this have to do with food?

Forty years may feel like a long time to wait for your money, but in food, forty years is nothing. Over hundreds of years, tiny changes piled up, one after another, generation after generation, until what we call “food” today barely resembles what it started as.

Take chocolate, for example:

• The beginning: The cacao bean was originally ground into a bitter paste and consumed as a drink by the Mayans and Aztecs, no sugar, no dairy.
• Europe sweetens it: In the 1500s, sugar, cinnamon, and vanilla were added to make it more palatable.
• Milk chocolate is born: In 1875, Daniel Peter, with Henri Nestlé’s milk powder, created the first milk chocolate. Simple: cocoa bean, sugar, milk powder.
• Industrial tweaks: Later, chocolate makers separated cocoa mass and cocoa butter for more control. Then shortcuts appeared: cocoa butter was swapped for cheaper vegetable oils. One small change at first, but greed steps in, and small changes compound. Regulators eventually had to step in: most countries now require a minimum percentage of cocoa solids for something to legally be called chocolate.

When companies couldn’t cut any more corners on ingredients, they got creative with marketing. There are fewer products on shelves that haven’t been “creatively presented.” Think about sweeteners, as I’ve mentioned many times, so many people think they’re consuming only stevia or monk fruit, but they’re not. The only way to know? Read the ingredients. Understand them. Then you can answer your own question.

• Efficiency over tradition: True chocolate takes days of grinding and conching to achieve that silky, emulsified melt. Emulsifiers like lecithin (often soy-based) speed this up dramatically.
• Flavour “engineering”: As real ingredients were stripped away, artificial flavours and sweeteners were added to trick your tongue.

And now, whatever can’t legally be called chocolate is called compound chocolate. A standard compound chocolate bar usually looks like this: sugar, vegetable oil, milk powder, cocoa powder, emulsifiers, and flavourings. Cocoa, the very thing that makes chocolate chocolate, is no longer the star. The cocoa that remains is just powder. All the fat now comes from added vegetable oils because they’re not going to waste money on using cocoa butter, which is usually still present in cocoa mass.

On top of all of that, real chocolate needs tempering to get that glossy shine and clean snap. Tempering takes skill and time. Compound chocolate? Doesn’t need it. Businesses can just melt it, use it, and move on. That’s why almost all the “cooking chocolate” you see in supermarkets is compound: the brands know you’ll heat it, and if it were real chocolate, it would need to be tempered again to set properly. Most people don’t realise this, which is why “cooking chocolate” can be misleading.

Over time, our palates changed alongside these ingredient swaps. If you tasted the original chocolate bar, you probably wouldn’t like it or even recognise it. This makes it extremely difficult for companies to produce “real food” that meets modern taste expectations, because humans now expect food to last forever and look and taste the same every time.

In the U.S., Hershey’s milk chocolate was originally made with slightly soured milk powder, giving it that tangy, distinctive flavour Americans grew up thinking is “normal” chocolate. Nestlé, on the other hand, uses non-soured milk powder, which is sweeter and creamier. People who didn’t grow up on Hershey’s often say, “That’s what chocolate tastes like,” while Americans used to Hershey’s might find it too mild. It’s a perfect example of how our palates adapt to the flavours we’re exposed to, shaping what we expect chocolate to taste like.

A great example of money and expectations is the banana. There are hundreds of varieties, but most people only know one or two, maybe three if you’re a banana enthusiast. If it’s not a Cavendish, you might hesitate to buy it. Why? Because decades of breeding, marketing, and money have shaped it to be exactly the same every time. When a disease nearly wiped out the Cavendish, the industry had to scramble to defend it, proving how much human expectation and profit shape what we eat.

Chocolate isn’t alone. The same slow swaps happened everywhere:

• Butter → Margarine: Butter was once a staple. Margarine was marketed as a “healthier” alternative, made from cheap seed oils instead of cream. It didn’t just affect toast,  margarine became the fat in pastries, cakes, biscuits, and processed meals. Today, butter is a rare luxury; margarine and oils dominate supermarket shelves.
• Sugar → Artificial sweeteners → “Healthy” sugars: Refined sugar replaced natural sweeteners like honey. Then artificial sweeteners came along. Today, most “sugar-free” products are full of cheap, chemical substitutes.
• Fruit & veg: Even apples and tomatoes aren’t what they once were. Selective breeding and genetic modification made them bigger and sweeter (because sweeter sells). To maintain yields and fight pests, farms rely on pesticides and chemicals. You still get “fruit and veg,” but often less nutrient-dense and more sugar-heavy than what your grandparents ate.
• Hot chips: Once it was just potato, lard, and salt. Today? Industrial seed oils, anti-foaming agents, preservatives, even sugar for browning. A three-ingredient comfort food is now a science experiment.

These changes didn’t happen overnight. They arrived slowly, one tweak at a time, just like compound interest. Each seemed harmless alone. But stacked over decades, the “food” on your plate no longer resembles food.

You’re not eating food anymore, you’re eating formulas designed to taste like food. Each little shift was justified, normalised, marketed as progress. But together? They’ve compounded into something unrecognisable. A chocolate bar or biscuit from your great-grandparents’ time barely resembles what’s on supermarket shelves today.

Food isn’t food anymore because profit got in the way of purity. 

The good news? We don’t have to accept it. Every time we choose real ingredients over manufactured ones, we reclaim a little of what our ancestors always knew, food should nourish, not deceive.

And it starts in our kitchens.