I have mulled this over since Tuesday and after losing another hour of sleep last night lying awake thinking about this, I have decided to be honest. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to share my thoughts but at the end of the day, why the heck not?
Let’s back track to Tuesday evening. I was getting ready to leave the office and decided to check CNN for a few minutes. My CNN perusing usually goes like this: scan the opening page for unread/interesting articles and then immediately click on the Health section. On Tuesday afternoon, the Health section opened to this article: And Inconvenient Challenge: Eat ‘Real Food’ for a Month.
The article explains the challenge that blogger Jennifer McGruther of the Nourished Kitchen gave to her readers. She gave them simple task to “purge your pantry of processed foods.” Organic processed foods had to go too. During the month Jennifer blogged about her forays into cultivating yogurt and making cheese at home instead of buying them in the store. She did this challenge to show that eating an unprocessed diet is doable.
To put it simply, this article infuriated me. I felt like one of those cartoon characters where they are so angry that stream is coming from their ears. I kept reading it over and over hoping I was reading it incorrectly. I stopped my
Iamsomadatthisarticle thoughts for a moment and realized that I wasn’t actually mad. I was sad. Isn’t sadness always the underlying feeling when we are angry?
But why was I sad? Why does it still make me sad to re-read this article? I am not exactly sure. Jennifer said that she likes the idea of eating less processed foods but there are healthy processed foods that you can buy too. I completely agree but my concerns came with the term ‘real food.
My first issue is that healthy, useful foods like refined oils, flour, sugar, milk, cheese, bread, and dried pastas are lumped together with soda, candy, cookies, and chips as “processed foods.” Yes, the whole wheat flour you buy in a paper bag at the grocery store is technically processed because your not grinding wheat in your kitchen but to include it in the same category as soda is just asinine. Not all processed foods are created equal.
My concern is how we define ‘real food.’ We don’t need to victimize refined oils, flour, salt, dairy, and pasta as ‘bad’ when they are in fact, perfectly healthy (and delicious!) in most diets. Real food should be food that makes sense. If you understand how something is made or where it comes from, then it is real. If you can’t explain a food’s origin, then it probably isn’t the most ideal thing to eat. Case in point, apples come from apple trees, milk comes from a cow, bread is from wheat, and Strawberry Pop-Tarts… no idea!
I understand the point of Jennifer’s challenge and I think it is admirable to show that eating an unprocessed diet it attainable. It is great that she asked her readers to become more aware of their daily food choices. I completely agree that it isn’t always the easiest way to eat but it bothered me that this article acted as if it was difficult or impossible. One of Jennifer’s reader’s said ” I got rid of tons of stuff — enough stuff, that I had trouble figuring out what to feed my kids.” It wasn’t Jennifer’s challenge that made me sad, it was notion that solely eating unprocessed foods for 30 days is somehow burdensome. It shouldn’t be that way. Nobody should think that eating a diet based on unprocessed food is challenging. It should be easier to order a salad than a burger with fries at a restaurant. It should be easier for kids to chose milk instead of soda in the school’s cafeteria. It should be easier. But often time it is not. What does that say about us? Are we so dependent on boxed, canned, bagged, prepared and frozen foods that we cannot survive without them? That is sad.
My favorite quote of this article comes from Jennifer when she says, “real health comes from real food, and real food never comes from a box.”
Enough of my ramblings, what are you thoughts? How do you define ‘real food’?
To put it simply, this article infuriated me. I felt like one of those cartoon characters where they are so angry that stream is coming from their ears. I kept reading it over and over hoping I was reading it incorrectly. I stopped my Iamsomadatthisarticle thoughts for a moment and realized that I wasn’t actually mad. I was sad. Isn’t sadness always the underlying feeling when we are angry?
I really didn’t like the garlic. I was hesitant to add it in the first place because cucumber and garlic didn’t seem like a food combination that I would enjoy but I followed the recipe like I was supposed to do. Don’t get me wrong, I love cucumbers and I love garlic but putting them together is like putting Tiger and Elin together. They just don’t get along.
