Food Politics

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Marion Nestle, Sharon Maraj, Linda Sgoluppi, Tom & Lori Leavitt and others. Tom & Lori Leavitt said: RT @marionnestle: Darya Pino’s guide to how to find real food in the supermarket http://bit.ly/eUWTzz [...]

Science is scary, we must avoid it! I hate to tell you, but those fruits and meats have scary sounding chemicals in them, as does all matter in the universe.

The only things that makes a health claim that count as food are dairy products?

This is so stupid.

Says a person who doesn’t eat food (see previous comment).

Eat food. Not too much. THE END.

The split-pea soup I made on Friday had more than five ingredients. Should I have stopped when I got to the celery?

I wanted to just get some water but when I got home I found that the supermarket gave me a bottle of hydroxylic acid instead! It’s in sciencese so I’m very very scared. Should I drink it or take it back?

Nice post! I actually hadn’t seen the diagram before, and it makes a lot of sense to me. My partner and I have nevertheless even decided to go a step further, and explained in a recent post why we have decided to stop buying food from supermarkets altogether… (http://makingsenseofthings.info/2011/01/why-weve-decided-to-stop-buying-food-from-supermarkets/) It will probably sound weird for most, but to us, it just makes sense!… Anyway, where do you buy your food then?

jsr

Vitamin B12 is called Cobalamin
Vitamin C is Ascorbic Acid

See a theme here?

I agree. All too often at the supermarket I see people with carts full of frozen and boxed goods. Those types of foods aren’t too good for the brain and body. I always stick with meats, vegetables, eggs, milk, and grains. But hey, if corndogs and microwaveable pizza flavored pocket microwave snacks are your thing, enjoy!

Have you EVER found a ripe non-rock-hard peach (in the “fresh” veggie section of a typical grocery store) while shopping?

Not I.

If it wasn’t for peaches in a can (same with pears) I would have to hop a freight train and trek to where those fruits are grown and seek a tree where those fruits were allowed to mature to a stage of ripeness that would allow a human without jaws and teeth of steel to eat them as evolution intended.

Ascorbic Acid is not a food – it’s a sugar acid that can be isolated from food or synthesized in a labratory. Even the USDA’s organic certification program asserts this, limiting the potential for a product to be certified organic if it has more than a very small amount of ascorbic acid added. Vitamin C is so easy to get in food – even if the nutritional value of taking ascorbic acid weren’t controversial, it seems sill to pay for a product that adds it to make their non-food look healthier.

On the other hand, Cobalmin, aka vitamin B-12, is the natural form of that vitamin but it’s very hard to find a supermarket product with cobalmin added – usually you’ll find cyclocobalmin as the B-12 additive, which is synthesized in a lab, much cheaper to use in production, and when the body breaks it down, it leaves a small amount of cyanide behind to be dealt with by the liver. Nice.

B-12 is really tough to get in your food though, which points out to me the basic flaw in this diagram. It is based on an idealism that few people in this country, or world, can attain. If you happen to be particularly fond of liver, giblets, oysters and clams, or can afford to have Alaskan king crab on a regular basis you may be ok on B-12! If you do dairy and include a lot of swiss cheese and whole milk in your diet, you may still be ok.

Otherwise, you probably need a supplement. Maybe we need a different diagram for that, to help us navigate all the synthesized versions of nutrients that may not be as helpful as the sellers would like us to believe.

So, I can eat nothing but red meat, organic ice cream and bananas, and that’s okay, because it’s real food? But I should avoid a fruit puree smoothie from the health food store- health claims and more than 5 ingredients.
Plus, when I buy unprocessed food, I usually bring it home- and process it myself by cooking, blending, etc, and most of the time by combining more than 5 ingredients.
These rules seem kind of arbitrary, similar to some people’s very strict religious eating guidelines.

A general rule I follow is to keep to the outside of all the aisles i.e. shop around the perimeter. That’s where you’ll find the produce, dairy, butcher. As one ventures into the aisles the foods tend to get more processed.

I’ve seen health claims on bags of spinach and containers of roasted almonds. They’re both (relatively) unprocessed, natural foods. One ingredient in the spinach (spinach), two in the almonds (almonds, salt). Admittedly, you shouldn’t buy it because of the health claims on the box, but health claims don’t imply it’s not real food.

This diagram makes no sense.

Is salt not food? Can we not use iodized salt (both never alive and chemical names), despite the fact that iodized salt has single-handedly vastly improved thyroid health in this country?

Why is dairy the only food that is allowed to be highly processed and fortified? That’s a big clue that this diagram has little to do with eating healthy, minimally processed foods and everything to do with eating foods that people believe are “traditional” and therefore acceptable.

It’s one thing to say that you should avoid nutritionally-deficient highly processed foods (like added sugars and oils), it’s quite another to say that processing in and of itself makes a food non-nutritive. It doesn’t. It often makes it MORE nutritious (see dairy, salt).

Dairy Product -> Does it contain starch, gum, pectin or other coagulation ingredient? (YES) -> Return to shelf.

Almost anything with flour in it uses enriched flour, so you’ll see half a dozen vitamins as well as the actual wheat, so you’re ruling out bread – did you really mean to do that? And what about the breads that have nine kinds of grain or whatever? On the other hand, some tortillas just have corn, lime, and water, while others have a dozen kinds of preservatives and texture modifiers, and I don’t buy those. (Preservatives provide a useful function, and are probably better to eat than mold, but keeping tortillas in the freezer works fine too.)

And my father was a chemist, and I took Latin in high school, so there aren’t any chemicals I can’t pronounce. But when I buy frozen vegetables at the Chinese grocery store, sometimes they’ll use give the Latin name of the plant if it doesn’t have an English name, and that’s just fine. (The cooking instructions are probably in Chinese, but that just means that cooking it is more experimental.)

[...] Source: Darya Pino’s guide to supermarket navigation. [...]

I think many posters are missing the point of this diagram…it’s supposed to be funny!

I love the “Might it contain bacon anyway?” question, still chuckling to myself .

This is great. Now i’m really confusled. There is truely insight to this rethoric *~*

GEE WHIZ…..LIghten up, people! Use your common sense here….it’s supposed to be funny with a touch of reality mixed in. The five ingredient thing is for PROCESSED food, not things you make in your kitchen or get at the smoothie bar. Good Grief! Does someone really need to explain that to you??

I think this is a brilliant chart. Makes great sense and is simple to follow. However, those wonderful fruits and vegetable have been sprayed with harmful chemical and pesticides that can cause harm to our bodies. What I do is make a spray that will clean some of the harmful things. I use 1 cup of clean water, 1 cup of peroxide and
3-5 teaspoons of dish soap. Mix this together in a spray bottle and keep it near your sink and it will always be ready to use on your fruits and veggies. Just remember to rinse the items very well or you will get a soapy taste in you mouth.

Novel idea, but fails in its execution.

But, if this is just a draft, here is some feedback- The arrows don’t make sense, the questions are trivial and nonsense as well. Reframe them. The five ingredient rule is ridiculous as others have pointed out- I make a great Pumpkin Soup that has about 10 ingredients and is loaded with antioxidants, vitamins, and superfoods.

In addition the chart diminishes the value of whole grains. Rice, oatmeal, quinoa, amarynth … all have significant nutritional values. I eat them quite often … and they all have labels on them. Even when bought in the bins- the store still puts the label on it. Nutritional labels can be a helpful tool to us, which is why the consumer essentially demanded them from year’s past!

Silly chart, just going to get people frustrated on eating healthy and making the claim- see, it really is hard to eat right.

This is great! Real food comes from a farm, not a factory.

This chart is fun, and at least thought provoking – and maybe helpful to some people, for example someone who is new to healthy eating, but doesn’t know much. As long as they are up for preparing everything from scratch from whole ingredients, this would be helpful. But once you learn more, for example what some of the “science-y” names mean, you can label read and make these decisions without these blanket guidelines. Canned soup may not be the nectar of the gods but if it is organic and has 10 perfectly fine ingredients, I might eat it on occasion without losing sleep over it. Or if they added ascorbic acid to something as a preservative. Etc.

It’s like the “only the outer aisles” shopping technique. That doesn’t really pan out, though. If you want some brown rice, or a can of tomato paste, or some coconut milk, whoops, had to go down an inner aisle. There is usually something reasonable on almost every aisle, I mean, even the chips and soda aisle has bottled water and wine at my store. Since I don’t impulse purchase chips whenever I walk past them, this is not a problem (might be for some) as I go get an occasional San Pellegrino.

“Dairy Product -> Does it contain starch, gum, pectin or other coagulation ingredient? (YES) -> Return to shelf.”

Exactly when have starch, gum (presumably xanthan gum), or pectin become bad for you?

OMG. Lighten up people! This is a humorous take on a real issue. Guess it just proves how truly confused about what to eat we all are.