Enriched describes food that has had vitamins and minerals added to make it more nutritious — restoration rather than invention. The classic case is white flour: milling strips away the B vitamins and iron of the bran and germ, and enrichment puts thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, folic acid, and iron back, roughly to whole-grain levels. White rice, cornmeal, and some breakfast cereals are enriched the same way. Enrichment differs from fortification, which adds nutrients a food never contained — enrichment replaces what processing removed. The policy began in the 1940s to combat deficiency diseases and remains mandatory in many countries. Critics note enriched flour is still not whole grain — the fibre stays lost — but as a public-health measure, enrichment quietly corrected population-wide shortfalls in B vitamins and iron.