Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Pandora's Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal
    Pandora's Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal
    Pandora's Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal
    Audiobook8 hours

    Pandora's Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal

    Written by Melanie Warner

    Narrated by Ann Marie Lee

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    If a piece of individually wrapped cheese retains its shape, color, and texture for years, what does it say about the food we eat and feed our children? Former New York Times reporter and mother Melanie Warner decided to explore that question when she observed the phenomenon of the indestructible cheese. She began an investigative journey that took her to research labs, food science departments, and factories around the country. What she discovered provides a rare, eye-opening-and sometimes disturbing-account of what we're really eating. Warner looks at how decades of food science have resulted in the cheapest, most abundant, most addictive, and most nutritionally devastating food in the world, and she uncovers startling evidence about the profound health implications of the packaged and fast foods that we eat on a daily basis.

    From breakfast cereal to chicken subs to nutrition bars, processed foods account for roughly seventy percent of our nation's calories. Despite the growing presence of farmers' markets and organic produce, strange food additives are nearly impossible to avoid. Combining meticulous research, vivid writing, and cultural analysis, Warner blows the lid off the largely undocumented-and lightly regulated-world of chemically treated and processed foods and lays bare the potential price we may pay for consuming even so-called healthy foods.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateApr 29, 2013
    ISBN9781452683218
    Author

    Melanie Warner

    Melanie Warner is a freelance writer for various publications, including The New York Times and Fast Company. She has spent the past fifteen years writing about business, first as a writer at Fortune magazine, where among other things, she wrote about the dotcom boom in Silicon Valley. She was also a staff reporter for The New York Times, covering the food industry. The author of The Magic Feather Effect and Pandora’s Lunchbox, she lives in Honolulu.

    Related to Pandora's Lunchbox

    Related audiobooks

    Business For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Crap-free Cooking For Kids

      Mar 4, 2020

      Crap-free Cooking For Kids
      7 min read

    • Article

      IN CONVERSATION WITH Alex Elliott-Howery

      Feb 15, 2023

      Tell us about your journey into the food world. Where did it all begin and how? I've always loved food and grew up in a household that loved to cook and loved to feed people, so I guess it all started then. I'm not a trained chef, just a very enthusi

      3 min read

    • Article

      How Cooking for Yourself Can Make You Healthier, Happier

      Jan 29, 2018

      As my great-aunt June used to tell me, "Your grandfather was a bum. Your father was a bum, and you're a bum. Get outta my house!" Reading between the lines, what I think she was trying to say, in her own, frothing fashion, was, "Don't let the good be

      4 min read

    • Article

      Joanna Blythman Out Of The Crisis Came Creativity

      Jun 25, 2020

      It happened in the blinking of an eye. Overnight, Britain got hands-on in the kitchen again. Before coronavirus, asking people to cook from scratch on a regular basis seemed hopelessly romantic, positively anachronistic, even. Voices, such as my own,

      2 min read

    • Article

      Ten Minutes With… Olivia Biermann

      May 21, 2021

      How long have you been vegan, and what made you make the change? I started my vegan journey 6 years ago in university when I had to cut out dairy due to digestive issues. Over the course of 2 years I learned more about the ethics of it and decided to

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Joy Of Food

      Sep 15, 2019

      The Joy Of Food
      11 min read

    • Article

      Please, Stop Hippiewashing

      Apr 21, 2022

      Please, Stop Hippiewashing
      2 min read

    • Article

      Ten Minutes With… Rachel Brownstein

      Jan 22, 2021

      How long have you been vegan, and what made you make the change? Officially since January 2018. I started seeing animal welfare videos on social media, and of course, the more you watch, the more the algorithms show you. I started feeling guilty afte

      1 min read

    • Article

      Commentary: Food Waste Is Destroying The Planet. Doing Something About It Starts At Home

      Jun 6, 2018

      On a recent Monday, my kitchen was full of breakfast options: apple-topped streusel, lemon poppyseed muffins, almond Danish. There were also ripe bananas, dented boxes of cereal and several cartons of eggs, each with one cracked and cemented in its c

      4 min read

    • Article

      Getting On The Cans

      Mar 25, 2020

      Getting On The Cans
      2 min read

    • Article

      Come To Your senses

      May 27, 2022

      Come To Your senses
      10 min read

    • Article

      Ten minutes with… Bettina Campolucci Bordi

      Aug 20, 2021

      How long have you been vegan, and what made you make the change? My culinary journey started around 8 years ago. I was cooking plant-based and gluten-free dishes at Wellness Retreats which naturally transcended into my own life. For me, I prefer to c

      2 min read

    • Article

      Coeliac Awareness Week: 10 Best Gluten-free Cookbooks To Kick Coeliac Disease In The Gut

      May 12, 2021

      Nobody likes to be told they cannot eat something, and those with coeliac disease are no different. But for the hundreds of thousands of people with the autoimmune condition, eating foods containing gluten could prove dangerous. If gluten is eaten, t

      7 min read

    • Article

      Making A Meal Of It

      Mar 17, 2019

      Making A Meal Of It
      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Pandora's Lunchbox

    4/5

    65 ratings8 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      I love this book. Whenever I re-read it, processed foods become much less tempting for a while.
    • 4/5
      Melanie Warner takes an adventurer's attitude in her quest to understand how food is processed and discovers a world of ingredients and flavors that delight our senses while undermining our nutrition. Unlike Michael Moss (Salt Sugar Fat), she accepts the industry's profit motive but notes that the people who make the profits possible don't eat the products. Instead, they eat simply but well - something that is possible for all of us with very little effort.

      Why demonize an industry when we have choices?
    • 3/5
      Melanie Warner had heard the rumors that Twinkies would never spoil, so she decided to test that theory. Using different processed foods (cookies, burgers, chicken nuggets), Warner started a little laboratory in her home. She left the food undisturbed and unrefrigerated, and cataloged the results. From mildly amusing (huh, those Oreos haven't really even gone stale) to downright repulsive (completely liquefied frozen organic chicken nuggets), the results spoke for themselves. Truly unprocessed food would succumb to the normal process of decomposition via bacteria or molds, just like any other organic life-form. But the highly processed foods did not culture anything that could break them down. Very unnatural.Warner treads a lot of the same ground that Michael Moss covered in Salt, Sugar, Fat, and even references some of the same stories. What I found interesting was her description of the chemical processes involved in creating the flavors and textures that we have come to expect in convenience foods.While I agree with Warner's conclusion that it is within our own power to change what kinds of food we insist upon eating, I still think that too many people will say it's too difficult and inconvenient to select and purchase fresh food, and then cook it. Again, I think books like these preach to the choir.
    • 4/5
      It's a good book - with some good research and it does make you stop and think about what you're eating. I think she could have had a stronger finish - the end was a bit wishy washy - so well, what do we do? Considering all of the Monsanto crap, what's put into our food is very important. And I know I'm eating crap when I eat morningstar farms bacon. I would probably be better off eating organic bacon.
    • 3/5
      adult nonfiction; food science/molecular engineering. Chemicals in your (processed) foods; not enough data to show how many of which are harmful (or not), but there is certainly enough evidence to be wary.

      Sept 2020 update: I checked out the e-audio and this version is also good. Didn't finish it because I'd already read it (just forgot that I had).
    • 3/5
      This was an informative and balanced book. I thought the author did a reasonable job of presenting information without an overly skewed narrative. She certainly had her biases but for some reason, they came off as charming; rather than annoying. I learned a few things and reconfirmed my suspicions that people are better off the more we cook from scratch with whole ingredients.
    • 3/5
      People who read this book are already partially convinced that we need to change how food is produced in the US, forgoing low cost or benefitting large corporations, and making moves to improve health. This book has some compelling information. It delves into the issues of additives or ingredients that are several steps removed from anything produced by Mother Nature. I definitely learned that my healthy breakfast of cereal is not nearly as healthy as I thought. But, I felt that this book too often strays from good factual data to personal anecdotes. I'm glad that the author's son seemed less moody when he embraced a healthier diet, but I want more facts. The book has potential, but is missing an unbiased viewpoint to be placed in the same category as books like The China Study, and lacking the beautiful writing style or emotional impact of Jonathan Safron Foer's Eating Animals to become a book that I would recommend to others.
    • 3/5
      Lots of information on what "processed" really means in terms of modern food production. A combination of food science history and detailed explanations of the various chemicals and procedures used to create modern packaged food. I sometimes skimmed over the technical details, but it was very eye-opening to learn just what happens to our food. I was surprised that even food I thought was natural, like vegetable oil, goes through pretty extreme processing just to make it palatable.