Why Did We Replace Real With Fake?

January 13, 2026

By Jeffrey Tucker

Reprinted from The Epoch Times

The signs of the time were certainly invisible to me. But looking back now, it’s remarkable to imagine what kind of food frenzy swept over my generation growing up. We were flooded with fake products that replaced real food. Maybe we were aware that it was happening but trusted it enough not to question it. Indeed, it was widely assumed that we were finally eating healthy for the first time.

Buckets of whipped topping made of hydrogenated vegetable oils dominated family dinners where the “salads” on the table were artificial ingredients and canned processed fruits with artificial colors. We spread yellow oil on our bleached and highly processed white bread and pretended that it was as good as butter. Eggs were seen as primitive and probably dangerous and better replaced by a yellow goo from a carton.

Even the meat was cooked to become brown and drained of all fat. We were told that this was what all the new research had proven was consistent with health. No one in those days thought to question the experts on TV and the recipes clipped from the newspaper. It was a culture of trust and the path of progress was given to us by every authority.

The messaging was ubiquitous and uniform: stop eating animal products because they are dangerous to human health. Eat grains: noodles, rice, oats, corn, soy, wheat. Industry has found ways to make the new food delicious. Trust the packages. Whatever is traditional is probably bad while every innovation in food will make us more healthy.

Looking back on this experience, the change all happened remarkably fast. Only a few years earlier, I have vague recollections of canning homegrown vegetables with my grandmother who shared the fall harvest with family. We attended family reunions where the main activity was shelling peas. I spent weekends in the kitchen with her fussing over jars with lids and stacking jars in the garage panty, which held the food for the winter months.

When a cow was slaughtered, the family would divide it up and we packed it in the huge freezers everyone had. The meat for the day was removed the night before to thaw for eating the next evening at the family dinner. No one drained any fat off anything. Whole milk was the norm. I don’t even recall something called skim. Butter, eggs, meat, and vegetables from the extended family was food.

At some point, perhaps sometime around the Watergate era, everything began to change. The announcements came daily. What we were eating was actually “bad” for us. That was the slogan I heard over and over. Such and such is bad. This replacement is good.

The school lunches changed dramatically. The whole milk and the chocolate milk were gone and replaced with skim milk. The kids would not drink it. Hamburger day had been everyone’s favorite but it suddenly became soyburger day. No one would eat those either. The buttered rolls became just corn-oil rolls. We had food fights with those.

The trash cans at the school became filled with food. Candy and soda merchants persuaded the school that they needed to install machines in the hallway because clearly the kids were not eating their lunches. School administrators went along. It was a great day. The lunch money our parents gave us all went toward candy and sodas while the cafeteria was used only by poor kids who had lunch tickets.

Family dinners were never the same again. The diet of generations was replaced in a matter of a year or so. New products were everywhere. Mac and cheese was boiled noodles with a yellow sauce made from powder and skim milk. Hamburger Helper was the way we got protein but it was all fat free and extremely lean.

Nothing was off limits for the list of sins. Salt was bad. Milk was terrible. Meat was to be reduced to the minimum necessary and one was made to feel bad for eating it. Somehow what was called TV Dinners got a pass. No one knew for sure what was in them but they tasted better than any of the approved food we could make at home.

Products bragged of being “non-dairy” creamers, which is so strange, if you think about it. This makes no more sense than non-cow beef or non-fowl chicken. Somehow we bought it anyway.

There was a cultural and even ideological context for the change. The clamor for the new was the driving passion of the day. The Vietnam War had come to an ignoble end and there was no real desire to look back. Home furnishing went from traditional to what was labelled modern: no moldings, dens, chairs, and sofas in new shapes and fabrics, wall-to-wall shag carpet.

Industry was seen as the shepherd of the new era. Polyester was regarded as a huge improvement over natural fibers. No more ironing. The stuff works well with washing and drying machines. No more worry about moths and cedar chests. The clothing issue here was huge: the notion of industrial progress was in evidence on our bodies and in our closets.

Air travel had become a commercial good. Cars and roads had improved enough to make coast-to-coast trips possible. Every home had a beautiful color TV. Racial harmony was made possible by the civil-rights movement and popular media celebrated it constantly, imagining a future vastly better than the past. For that matter, man had walked on the moon thanks to the unity of industry, technology, and science.

“​​This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius,” said the #1 song on the radio, one that won all the awards during this exact period. “Harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding; No more falsehoods or derisions, golden living dreams of visions.” See, there it is! The stars had finally aligned and utopia was dawning, just look around and see.

Examined this way, there was no question that the idea of industrial progress would hit the food too. No one had really suspected that behind the scenes there was a heavy hand on the scales, namely a corporate lobby that saw vast profits in mass production of cheap food to replace the family farm and local food.

The grain surpluses piled up quickly and ever more creative uses of the product had to be invented on the fly. Corn became butter then sugar and then gasoline. Soy became meat. Wheat was the new dietary staple, put in all cereals and embedded in unlimited amounts of sugar. My own life became flooded with brands of cereal, with boxes holding toys as treasures. An entire culture developed around sugary cereal. It might have been most of my diet at some point.

Eventually, it might have seemed like resistance was futile. We were surrounded, with rare exceptions. I have vivid memories of the holiday season at my paternal grandmother’s house where time stood still. Or rather, time made lots of noise: a huge grandfather clock in the living room, a cuckoo clock in the kitchen, and a wind-up desk clock in every bedroom. The top of the hour produced a symphony of sound. The sheets were cotton and the blankets wool.

The most striking feature of this household that time forgot were the meals. The tablecloth was linen, not wipeable plastic, and the napkins were cotton not paper. On a silver platter was a huge fatty roast, alongside porcelain plates of vegetables, a basket of homebaked yeast rolls, and a selection of homemade fruit pies for dessert. The furnishings too reflected the past: rugs and not wall-to-wall carpeting and real sofas and chairs, not movable sectionals. The walls were papered with designs.

This small environment—like an island of sanity in a world gone mad—was the outlier in a culture undergoing huge change and ended up as a catastrophe for health. Diabetes, obesity, and heart disease were the result, as waist bands grew and grew and sickness overtook a generation that had trusted the authorities to know what we should eat and how we should live.

Here is the context for the powerful shift that has taken place in policy circles in Washington. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has finally closed the book on this period of folly and newly codified truths that have emerged over the decades. He has turned the food pyramid upside down and made it perfectly clear that the path of authentic health and well-being is through real food of the sort my paternal grandmother never stopped making. All the rest was a disastrous diversion.

What a remarkable story it is. It’s one of the grave tragedies rooted in hubris and a false view of progress. There are surely lessons for us here. Even when it seems like the whole of the media and every other institution is screaming at you to abandon the ways of your ancestors, it’s best to think twice. You might be being led in a direction that will lead to your own demise.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of “The Best of Ludwig von Mises.” He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.