What does “actual food” mean? [closed]

I found this phrase in an article of The New York Review of Books, June 11, 2020, named “The Sickness in Our Food Supply”. The original text is

The renaissance of home cooking, and baking, is one of the happier consequences of the lockdown, good news both for our health and for farmers who grow actual food, as opposed to commodities like corn and soy.

I have searched this phrase in google, but the results were generally relevant to “actual food cost and theoretical food cost”. So corn and soy are not actual food? What does “actual food” mean?

Solution 1:

The passage's use of "actual food" is given away in the final part of the sentence. Usually when we refer to farmers, we're talking about those who raise crops and tend stock for direct food consumption. However, there are farms whose production of crops is used for other, more industrial, purposes. The products of which (such as corn syrup) may be indirectly used in the creation of other foodstuffs.

So "actual food" is refering to just those crops (vegetables, fruit, wheat, etc) that are grown for direct human consumption.

Solution 2:

Of course, corn and soy do constitute food, in the standard sense of the word food. This use of the word food is deliberately nonstandard; it belongs to the jargon of the movement that promotes a particular way of thinking about food. As the review of Michael Pollan's book Food Rules in the Houston Chronicle (reproduced on Pollan's own website) summarises it:

By “food” Pollan means real food, not creations of the food-industrial complex. Real food doesn’t have a long ingredient list, isn’t advertised on TV, and it doesn’t contain stuff like maltodextrin or sodium tripolyphosphate. Real food is things that your great-grandmother (or someone’s great-grandmother) would recognize.

Refusing to apply the word food to industrially processed food is a part of this movement's strategy to discourage people from eating it. Regardless of whether one supports or opposes the aims of the movement, one has to acknowledge that its way of using the word is bound to be confusing to those, such as the OP, who encounter it for the first time.

Corn (maize) and soy are used in the text as examples because they are usually grown on a large scale and industrially processed. If you bought a small amount of them on a local market, directly from the farmer who grew them, they would count as food, even in this, highly idiosyncratic, sense of the word.

(This answer is an elaboration of the point that was first made by Professor Donovan in a comment.)