Question 2: Restaurants and Processed Food

I’ve had a number of conversations with people so far about eating out while avoiding processed foods. It gets pretty difficult to know what kinds of ingredients restaurants use in their food, and whether those ingredients include processed food or not. I’ll never be able to determine whether Chipotle’s tortillas have some kind of crazy preservatives or not (but the rest of what they serve is totally fine).

Dinners should be pretty simple. Since most of the restaurants I go to place a high value on using locally sourced & fresh ingredients, I’ll just keep going to those places. I have a rough life, I know.

Lunches get a lot trickier. Does the hole-in-the wall Mexican place I go to every week use processed foods? It’s so cheap, it’s hard to imagine that they don’t. The huge spit of lamb-beef combo meat at the Mediterranean restaurant is pretty questionable. Clearly, I need some more standards, targeted at restaurants.

Guideline 1: A Restaurant Should Cook All Its Own Food
The basic idea here is that if a restaurant gets its food from a central distributor (I’m thinking pre-made chicken nuggets, French fries, etc.), then the food’s probably gone through quite a bit of processing.

On the other hand, if a restaurant makes all food in-house, they don’t need to rely on preservatives to make the food last longer or chemicals to drive down the costs.

I think my Mexican hole-in-the-wall is OK. They clearly cook all their own food and I can see that the amount of “processing” is minimal, if non-existent. The tortillas are hand-made daily, and the meats are cooked when I order it, and salsas are made from scratch.

Guideline 2: Understand All the Ingredients
This mirrors my earlier guideline of “You Have To Know What It Is.” If I want to avoid processed foods, I should avoid ordering things where I have to wonder how it’s made. This helps on several levels – I can avoid certain ingredients like cheap processed cheese, and I can

Again, the Mexican hole-in-the-wall is totally OK. I see & understand everything that comprises a taco. The delicious lamb-beef combo meat (I still don’t know how they make that stuff) is definitely out.



I'm sure I'm missing something... Thoughts?

Question 1: What Counts as Processed?

Whenever someone hears that I gave up processed foods for Lent, their first question is always “What Counts as Processed?” For instance, bread is pretty far removed from the raw wheat that it comes from. Even more importantly, cheese and sausage are both “processed,” but not in the same way a Twinkie is processed.

Remember though, cooking is not processing. Neither is curing, dehydrating, pasteurizing, or fermenting. These are age-old techniques humans have always used to prepare food. It’s not like this is a raw diet!

Guideline 1: If I’m Not Sure, I Won’t Eat It (“NSFW”)
It’s kind of like how you can’t define pornography, but you know it when you see it. I suppose the same goes for processed foods.

Many people add the description “NSFW” (Not Safe For Work) when they pass around links to web content that could be questionable - I know to avoid them, at least when I’m at the office.

The same goes for food. If it’s questionable, I know to avoid it, at least during this no-processed-foods-for-Lent thing.

Guideline 2: You Have Know What It is
My mother used to refuse to buy food for my sister and me if we couldn’t pronounce all the ingredients on the label. It was a great idea, but I got a little too good at pronouncing odd chemicals. And “High Fructose Corn Syrup” was just a little too easy to say.

So I’m tweaking that axiom a little bit. I have to have a good understanding of how a food is made and where on earth it comes from. I more or less understand how to turn milk into cheese, or grapes into wine. So these are perfectly fine for me to eat. Same with bread and sausage.

I have no clue how they make MSG. I suppose this Wikipedia article about MSG could help, but that’s not really the point. Unfortunately, this will make my Chinese food habits much harder to support for a while.

What Else?
Am I missing something?

The Purpose: To Think More About What I Eat

I gave up “eating processed foods” for Lent this year – starting today, Feb 25, 2009, and ending on April 12, 2009 (also known as Easter). In their place, I’m going to try and follow Michael Pollan’s axiom: Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants.

I think I probably eat better than 99% of Americans. I avoid fast food like the plague, love vegetables, and cook for myself all the time.

I don’t want to be vegetarian – I love meat way too much. I don’t want to try and lose weight – I’m already a little bit too skinny as it is. I don’t even want to try and get healthier – though eating “mostly plants” will likely help reduce that ludicrously high cholesterol count.

I just want to be more deliberate about my food. I think I’ll enjoy eating more, since I’ll enjoy the process of selecting what I eat, preparing my meals, and then eating it.

Why blog about it? Why not… But really, if other people don’t hold me accountable, I’ll likely fall prey to the butterfingers in the office kitchen. Also, I’m sure I’m going to learn a lot during this process about things like where to shop, what kinds of foods work well for someone without a lot of time to cook, and what I can learn to eat without spending more money than I usually do.

So here, I’ll post some of the highlights of what I eat, the challenges of the “diet,” and what I’ve learned from the process. Hopefully folks will find it useful as they think more about the stuff they put into their bodies.

For More...

• NYT Interview with this Michael Pollan guy
• NPR Article (and audio interview) with this Michael Pollan guy