What’s to Eat?

Posted on March 1, 2007 by Dave Pollard
veggies 2Toxins. Chemicals. Artificial additives. Trans and saturated fats. Sugars. Salt. Genetically manufactured ingredients. Preservatives. Hormones. Pesticides. Herbicides. Cholesterol.

It’s hard to find foods that are free from this crap. Packaged, processed, and ‘fast’ foods are replete with them. Big Agribusiness makes its living by dumping all this junk in our food to make it cheaper to produce, better-looking or more addictive. So what can we do?

Ideally, we should buy all our food ingredients from local organic farmers (or grow our own). If that’s possible, and affordable for you, then you’ve got lots of choice, and you can stop reading this article.

For the rest of us, it’s a real challenge. I won’t get into the debate over whether it is natural or healthy to eat meat (humans have evolved, in different times and places, to be pure vegetarians, almost exclusively carnivores, and omnivores) — but most factory-farmed meats are a toxic soup of chemical additives designed to make the animal fatter faster, antibiotics, hormones, pesticides, herbicides and other poisons. Fish from the sewers that we have turned our rivers, lakes and oceans into are often so dangerous children and pregnant women are forbidden to eat them. Most processed and packaged foods, and the garbage we get from fast-food restaurants, are full of chemicals, trans fats and other artificial and adulterated ingredients that have never been proved safe and are suspects in a host of diseases. 

These processed foods also contain massive amounts of sugars: North Americans consume an average of nearly 140 pounds of sugars per year, half of it in sugared drinks, and ten times what our ancestors consumed a century ago. We’re addicted to it. And the Monsanto sugar substitute monopoly is ratcheting up our consumption at a dizzying rate, deepening our addiction and poisoning us with dangerous manufactured chemicals. Our salt consumption is tracking a similar dizzying upward curve. In most countries not only are genetically manufactured ingredients present in almost everything we eat, they’re not even labeled as such. The ‘accidental’ ingredients left over from chemical treatment of foods and from processing are likewise not on the label.

Even our fruits and vegetables are washed in poisoned water, soaked in artificial pesticides, herbicides and preservatives, and grown in depleted, nutritionally dead soil on which we’ve dumped ever-increasing amounts of chemical fertilizers. Even many of our favourite teas, coffees and alcoholic beverages contain harmful and unhealthy ingredients. And other favourite foods are replete with cholesterol.

Despite this, there are still lots of good things to eat, if you use your imagination and can get past your addictions. The key ingredients are organic, whenever possible locally-grown (because a lot of food value is lost in long-distance transportation and related preservation processes): fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, herbs, spices, beans and whole grains.

These ingredients can be combined, without much effort, into:

  • salads
  • raw side dishes (with or without sauces, seasonings, dips and dressings from these same ingredients)
  • meat and dairy substitutes (e.g. soy protein)
  • soups
  • juices
  • smoothies
  • high-omega, unsaturated oils
  • natural low-calorie sweeteners (e.g. stevia)
  • spreads (e.g. peanut butter, sugarless jams)
  • teas
  • animal-fat cooking substitutes (e.g. applesauce)
  • healthy breads (e.g. oat, flax, quinoa)

The keys to making eating only such foods delicious are

  1. getting past our snobbery about simple raw foods (who says everything needs to be cooked, chilled or mixed with a dozen other ingredients?), 
  2. getting a lot of variety in our diet and the ingredients we use, and 
  3. as a result, achieving a good balance of macro- and micro-nutrients in our diet.

So even if we don’t have a variety of organic farms and gardens handy (or in our own yards), we can still eat healthy, and, by avoiding the processed foods and buying raw in bulk, save money as well. The pride of self-mastering another useful skill (healthy gourmet cooking), the satisfaction of reducing animal cruelty and the irresponsible Agri-golopy’s hold over our lives, and the pleasure of eating yummy meals, are just the (stevia-sweetened) icing on the (carrot, spice andwhole grain flour) cake.

Mmmm!

Categories: Let-Self-Change and Health
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8 Responses to What’s to Eat?

  1. MLU says:
    March 1, 2007 at 22:39

    True. I heartily recommend a severe case of Type II diabetes. Take glucose readings 10 times a day and try to keep the numbers under 160 without much in the way of a functioning pancreas.You’ll find the recommended diet at the end of the post is about all that works. Stay on it for a few months, and you’ll slowly lose your addictions to oversweetened high fat foods, and you’ll find the basics of raw fruits and vegetables getting tastier than anything you’ve ever eaten. You’ll love to eat.You’ll find one of the great secrets of life: the things we need to do to save the world are not hard, are not expensive, and bring us joy in and of themselves.

  2. Barbara W. Klaser says:
    March 2, 2007 at 13:31

    I find that when I buy organically-grown food, especially produce, the flavor is more intense. The fruit is sweeter, everything is so much more palatable, and this encourages healthy eating habits because of the immediate flavor reward. If only there were a way to make it just as low cost. I guess the answer to that would be for all farmers to use organic methods. But I’m willing to pay a little more when the benefits are obvious. Though not a lot more, because that would break my budget. It has to be within reason. I had to stop buying organic milk because it was more than twice the price! I haven’t even tried organic meat because of the price. I understand why it’s so much more expensive — feeding a large animal only organics is bound to cost more — but I have only so much to spend.Probably the most economic way to eat organic is to be vegetarian.

  3. Evan says:
    March 2, 2007 at 14:16

    Barbara, there is a great article on the web on how to eat organic for $7 a day. Granted, one does need to give up some things to do it. We struggle with this a bit since eating organic has raised our food bill considerably. We balance this by eliminating eating out(lord knows what you’re getting in restaurants) and by reducing our entertainment budget to $20 per month for Netflix. Food has become our entertainment and we are always looking for new ways to eat. Last night we had an organic carrot salad side dish with organic brown rice and organic steamed broccoli. The carrot salad was 2 large grated carrots, a handful of organic raisins and one large organic orange. When you buy in bulk and combine ingredients in new ways, you can make your dollars stretch. There are lots of resources on the web that teach this. I don’t want to open the door into a huge philosophical debate over eating meat/not eating meat, but there is plenty of research out there that suggests that it is much more difficult for the body to digest meat than fruit or vegetables. Fruit and vegetables contain the enzymes needed to digest them. Cooking will alter these enzymes, so it’s best to eat them raw. It has been argued that eating meat raw aids in the digestion of it, but who wants to eat meat raw? The body then has to call on help from organs other than the stomach to aid in the digestion of the meat, so the body works a bit harder, not to mention that it takes calcium from the bones to buffer the acid that the meat produces to aid in the elimination of its by products. Anyway, we feel a lot better since we’ve almost eliminated meat from our diet. We do slip occasionally, but notice that we don’t feel our best after eating meat, this includes chicken, turkey and beef. We’re gardening to help with our food bill, so hopefully that will help. Take care.

  4. Josh says:
    March 2, 2007 at 16:26

    Great post Dave. For the past two years, I’ve looked forward to reading your blog each day. One of my big interests in life is food and how our civilization has changed it from beyond what is natural into something unnatural and unhealthy altoghether. The prevalence of corn in modern food is astonishing. I’m reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan right now and I’d recommend it to anyone that has an interest in North American foodways. Keep up the good work!Evan – Thanks for the heads up on the $7 a day organic article! I googled it and found it right away.

  5. lugon says:
    March 2, 2007 at 17:08

    Dave also had some links on How to become a vegetarian in a number of weeks or steps, including a link to some website where they did send you recipes, reminders etc.

  6. mattbg says:
    March 3, 2007 at 08:50

    I’m starting to think that what’s NOT on the nutrition labels is perhaps more important than what IS on the labels. There’s so much more to food than what’s shown on the label. As we know from observing many other cases of someone being under the microscope for certain metrics, the metrics in focus will be optimized at the expense of other metrics.Potato chips, for example, have no reason to be harmful. The most basic types will simply consist of vegetable oil, potatoes, and salt. But.. what else? The fact that they use the frying oil, re-use it, and re-use again until there’s only sludge left to dispose of can’t be good for your health. But, it’ll never show up on the label.Heat harms nutrients. Most nutrition labels don’t contain a good nutritional analysis beyond the crap that I really don’t care about (fat, carbs, calories — maybe protein and iron and a few others).Even yoghurt contains the spurious “milk ingredients” rather than real milk. What’s this? Powdered milk? If it is, it’s a source of harmful oxidized cholesterol — different from plain cholesterol, yet it’ll simply show up on the label as “cholesterol”.What does processed cheese’s nutrition label tell you about it? It doesn’t tell you that it’s the leftover crap from the real cheesemaking, mashed together, decoloured and recoloured, and formed into the stuff you’re familiar with. Chemicals, food colouring, etc. don’t show up on nutrition labels. What’s the nutritional profile of a bottle of arsenic? Would it be low fat, low sugar, low cholesterol?I don’t believe we’ll ever create a healthy processed food product in my lifetime, so I just won’t touch the crap unless I really need to. You need heuristics for figuring this stuff out, rather than algorithms.

  7. mattbg says:
    March 3, 2007 at 09:05

    Another thing that we need to reacquaint ourselves with (and I know you touched on it in your post) is the taste of real food. The subtleties of real food aren’t appreciated by a lot of people anymore, it seems. Everything needs a seasoning or a sauce, whereas salt and pepper used to be good enough.The amount of effort that goes into a processed food product is incredible. Not only do you need to organize a whole series of ingredients that you can source reliably and store for the required amount of time in inventory (none of which will be in the interest of human health), but you have to process the individual ingredients to make them agreeable with manufacturing processes and come up with a taste profile that will satisfy the majority of people while surviving the manufacturing processes. And then you have to make sure the stuff can sit on the shelf for awhile without losing this taste profile. These are the priorities — not human health. The only thing related to human health that will be a priority is the nutritional label. And, honestly, I don’t think nutritional labels measure the health of the food. There’s another layer involved, concerning how your body processes the food and how the food interacts with other things you’re eating. I’m pretty sure this also has to do with genetics, what you ate when you were developing, etc. That’s why I’m not sure you can take diet trends from other countries (i.e. soy milk) and apply them to a body that has a history in a completely different culture and achieve the same benefit.Here’s one heuristic: if it doesn’t go bad quickly, you probably don’t want to be eating it. If bacteria don’t want to touch the stuff, why would you? If it doesn’t biodegrade quickly, what will happen to it once it’s inside your system?Anyway, there’s obviously not much science to back up what I’m saying. But, in a way, I’m starting to give up on science in this area. It’s very poor at considering system effects, and the research is easily manipulated. I don’t pay much attention anymore.

  8. Ken Whitley says:
    March 8, 2007 at 14:03

    If it won’t rot, it isn’t food. Good basic rule.Another is – if you made it yourself, would you put that ingredient in?Another version of this – every ingredient should be food by itself. Would you eat it?re science – that’s another institution we may have to give up if we let corporations own it. Too bad – it’s potentially a good one.

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