"Processed Food"I remember, actually, Sam Kass [former executive director of Let’s Move! and White House chef], at one point—we first met him because he was one of the people early on when we were campaigning who came in to help me cook while I started campaigning, because I just didn’t have the time to do it. And he was a core of our processed-food elimination.
And my kids loved the macaroni and cheese in a box. And he said, if it’s not real food then we’re not going to do it. If we want macaroni and cheese, we’ll cook it with real milk and real cheese. He said, there’s nothing wrong with mac and cheese, but it’s got to be real food.
So my oldest daughter [Malia], who was probably 8 at the time, he took a block of cheese and he said, if you can cut this cheese up into the powder that is the cheese of the boxed macaroni and cheese, then we’ll use it. She sat there for 30 minutes trying to pulverize a block of cheese into dust. I mean, she was really focused on it, and it just didn’t work, so she had to give up. And from then on, we stopped eating macaroni and cheese out of a box, because cheese dust is not food, as was the moral of that story.
It's okay to eat a dish of pasta made from heavily processed wheat that's probably not even whole grain. It's okay to eat waste products from bacteria consuming artificially-acidified milk. But drying a food into a powdered form that doesn't have to be refrigerated and then it becomes "not real" and "processed".
"Processed food" = food made from processes that are considered weird or icky by food snobs. Fact.
