Knowing what you're eating enables you to choose between nutritious foods and those that may harm your body.
If it is true that we are what we eat, we really should pay more attention to what we allow into our body. A bag of highly processed chicken nuggets, for example, may be easy to cook, is tasty and cheap. But nutrition-wise, these processed pieces of "chicken" are worthless.
In his campaign to get children to eat healthy school lunches, British chef Jamie Oliver visited schools in Britain and the United States of America to show children what nuggets were actually made of: "mechanically recovered meat" which translates into the butchered carcass of a chicken, plus chicken fat, plus chicken skin, which is then put through a machine to produce a pinkish slurry that looks like minced meat.
Shopping savvy: Consumers have no choice but to be discerning when shopping for food in a supermarket. Some products, like cheese that comes in a can, a vegetable spread in a tube, or soup in a sachet, just aren't real food.
This "meat" is mixed with flavoring, flour, breadcrumbs, polyphosphates or gums to help bind and flavor it. The result? Chicken nuggets!
Oliver's demonstration is disturbing and raises the question: Do we know what goes into the food we buy?
American journalist and food writer Michael Pollan feels consumers have no choice but to be discerning when shopping for food in a supermarket. Some products, like cheese that comes in a can, a vegetable spread in a tube, or soup in a sachet, just aren't food. They are edible food-like substance.
Don't eat anything your great-great-great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. Imagine how baffled your ancestors would be in a modern supermarket: the epoxy-like tubes of Go-Gurt (yoghurt you can eat on the go), the preternaturally fresh Twinkies, the vaguely pharmaceutical Vitamin Water. Those aren't quite foods; they're food products.
Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself. That way, it'll be less junky and you won't eat it every day because it's a lot of work.
Until then,
Happy Reading!
Evelyn
