Choosing Good Food
We spend a lot of time talking about food sourcing and what happens during food processing in my program. Most of this is common sense, in that we know eating food that looks like food is good for us. If it feels complicated in a supermarket because every product advertises magical health claims, that’s at least partly because a lot of people are being paid to confuse us into buying their food.
Most of what’s done to food is not for our health. It’s to make things cheaper to grow or raise, or more shelf-stable so that we can eat older products, or more uniform to make them easier to pack and price. The health-oriented modifications, like “enriching” grains, are never better than eating the original less processed version of the thing. That’s the tl;dr of this whole newsletter, but I go into detail on types of foods below.
Qualification: I’m writing all this from the perspective of someone living in a big city like New York, where you have choices about where to get your food, but are unlikely to visit farms directly or raise chickens in your backyard (though I would love to raise chickens, especially after reading this lovely comic about chickens in Crown Heights).
Produce
Fresh, local, seasonal produce preferably from a Greenmarket, a CSA or a farm you know about — that’s what’ll taste the best, be the best for you, and probably the best for the planet too. I didn’t really grow up with a sense for seasonality because I was so used to everything being available all the time at the supermarket. It’s taken time for me to cultivate that sense — a lot of Sundays at farmer’s markets and CSA boxes filled with roots all through winter, and fruit-picking excursions in the summer where I’ve made the connection between the hot June sun and the way the best strawberries taste like sunlight.
Unfortunately “organic” as a label has so many caveats and loopholes that it’s lost a lot of meaning. Synthetic pesticides are not allowed to be sprayed on organic product, but natural pesticides are still used and may be just as toxic. Organic farms often resemble their non-organic counterparts, being enormous monocrop factories whose soil lacks the nutrients you’d be getting in small-scale farms with crop rotation. And some of the farmers with the best agricultural practices don’t bother getting an organic certification due to its expense. In a supermarket with no other information, the organic stuff is probably better than the non-organic but it’s by no means a guarantee.
Meat, eggs, & dairy
Spend all your money on animal products. I mean, if you’re going to spend any money on animal products, go big and buy $7 eggs from the farmer’s market or get your beef from the Meat Hook.
Aside from the morality of the whole ordeal (“free-range” chickens are sometimes packed so tightly that not all of them can have their feet on the ground), or the sustainability (livestock accounts for ~15% of human produced greenhouse gases), eating processed meat increases chances of some cancers, heart disease, and diabetes. But animal products can be healthy, especially in comparison to highly processed vegan food-alternatives. We don’t have much meaningful labeling on animal products in the U.S. (once again, “organic” requirements include caveats like “no antiobiotics unless medically necessary,” but when you’re raising animals in terrible conditions, it turns out antibiotics are always medically necessary). Pasture-raised is a little better than free-range and grass-finished beef means the cattle stayed on the farm whereas grass-fed cattle are often moved to a CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation) at the end of their life. But as a rule of thumb, animal products from human scale farms are almost always better than industrial scale farms.
Seafood
This is almost too complicated to discuss, so I simply eat very little fish. We’re overfishing everybody in the ocean, so choosing wild-caught fish kind of sucks, but farmed fish are often fed wild fish, and are unhealthy in other ways. I’ll eat bonito flakes or use fish sauce here and there, because I feel like I’m getting the most fishiness out of the least fish, but otherwise avoid them. Oysters and other small shellfish tend to be better, but a lot of shrimp is caught using trawling, which is sort of like bulldozing a forest to hunt a deer.
Fats & Oils
All cooking oils are processed (apparently some people follow no-oil diets and just eat a lot of avocados, nuts, and seeds), but the type of processing can make them a lot less healthy for you or even much worse for you, like in the case of trans fat. A lot of processing involves subjecting foods to chemicals or high heat, which can destroy their antioxidants and other beneficial components. In general, cold-pressed oil, which is extracted via a slow mechanical process, has better nutritive properties. These oils can have lower smoke-points, though, so may not be as good for sautéing or frying. “Partially-hydrogenated” or “fractionated” oils are some of the ones to avoid.
I was a little miffed to learn that the label “Extra Virgin Olive Oil” doesn’t mean much in most countries, and in fact a lot of our olive oil is mixed with other vegetable oils. Supposedly Spain actually has more stringent regulations and exports more unadulterated oil than anywhere else, including Italy.
Grains
There is no supergrain, not quinoa or chia or rye berries or farro. Like the Planeteers, what you need is their power combined. We tend to get stuck eating the same grains over and over, maybe because we feel nervous about cooking a new kind or just because habits are hard to kick. Grains are really only cooked in one of two ways — either the pasta method (add as much water as you need to cover them, you’ll drain it off at the end) or the rice method (measure out a specific ratio of water to grain, and don’t stir the pot while it’s cooking). Once you’ve figured out which you’re working with, you just cook until it tastes chewy but not hard or chalky/raw inside.
Whole grains, as we’ve all heard, are better than partial grains. Whole grains include the bran, germ, and endosperm, while refining removes the bran and germ which is where most of the protein, minerals, fiber and B vitamins are. “Enriched” products means we take out the germ and bran and then add back some nutrients and synthetic vitamins. Maybe they’re better than non-enriched, but leaving the grain intact in the first place is healthier. Bob’s Red Mill is a good nation-wide brand for grains (also everything I’ve heard about the eponymous Bob suggests that he’s a cool dude).