Stick To Short List of Ingredients for Good Health

Wouldn’t it be great if all our food came straight from the community garden, local rancher, and our own kitchen?

I love carrots, tomatoes and cantaloupe right out of the garden and I rarely have the patience to let a loaf of fresh, homemade wheat bread cool before I cut off a chunk (especially if there are sunflower seeds inside!). From treating myelf to fresh feta cheese from the local dairy farm to buying local honey (many believe honey helps alleviate allergies), I love to haunt local CSAs and farmer’s markets.

But let’s get real.

Home cooking with local organic ingredients might be the healthiest way to eat, but few of us have the time or inclination to prepare three meals a day from scratch. Homemade bread is wonderful, but even with a bread maker machine, it is time consuming. Even grocery shopping can be labor intensive if you have to go to more than one store or market to find all of the in-season ingredients for more than a few dishes. Inevitably, given the fast paced, I-want-it-now society we live in, we need the convenience of grocery stores and prepared foods to feed our families. After all, one of the benefits of modernization is that we can follow our dreams and not always have to focus every moment on hunting and gathering. I’m grateful for some shortcuts after a long day, and I search them out at the market.

In most markets, the selection of prepared foods is overwhelming, and both the quality and nutritional value of similar foods vary widely. A rule of thumb is that if a food item is in any container other than its own nature-made rind or skin, I read the label. So if there is shrink-wrap, Styrofoam, a can, or a box, then there are probably additional ingredients and processing I want to know about. For example, pre-made flour tortillas could have between four and forty ingredients on the label, depending on where they are made. Some manufacturers use hydrogenated soybean oil, sodium metabisulfite, distilled monoglycerides… What is that anyway? (They are mostly preservatives and stabilizers, but those ingredients sure don’t sound like something I want to eat.)

So let’s eat real food.

Reading labels can be frustrating and takes a bit of extra time, so sometimes it is easier to look at the length of the ingredient list. If the list has more than a handful of ingredients, I just put it back on the shelf and keep moving. Remember to look in the refrigerated sections of the store since the products with fewer ingredients don’t contain as many preservatives and must often be chilled to remain fresh. Flour tortillas made simply from flour, salt, oil, and water (and sometimes a wonderful little squirt of lime) are often available with the cheese and deli items.

Using prepared foods that were made from simple, quality, pronounceable, and recognizable ingredients will make dinner preparation quick and healthy.

Until next time, eat well!