"Real Food"

I like cooking. I'm not so keen on the cleanup but I like cooking (and eating the things I've cooked...usually).

I feel a certain smug superiority when I cook. It is healthy. It is cheap. I tend to cook with minimum prepared ingredients (I use almost exclusively dried beans e.g.). Mostly though, it tends to taste better than much of what I can get out.

Still, I think these people are idiots. There is nothing inherently wrong with "processed" food. Bags of frozen vegetables are "processed" food. The bag of frozen okra I cooked up with tomato and onion said: "Ingredients: Okra" and nothing else. The fact that the okra was chopped and flash frozen made it processed. It also made it easier to ship longer distances and made it so that it was less likely to rot on a shelf and go to waste. Frozen foods in general are less wasteful than fresh...which wouldn't so much matter if all groceries composted their produce waste.

Now, it is certainly true that we have a wealth of overly processed food in this country and I would never argue that cheeze wiz is a good thing to eat, and there is something environmental to be said about eating local as much as possible--especially with fresh produce and meats which have more limited shelf lives and so much reach the shelf faster. Eating "real" foods that exclude, e.g., lowfat milk and dried pasta, is, on the other hand, pretty fucking stupid.

One of the things I read in the article mentioned a steak and baked potato meal. Seriously? I've got a chicken chili at home that has some processed foods (canned tomatoes, dried beans, olive oil) that I know is better for a person than would be a steak and potato dinner. The tomatoes I stewed with the okra were from a can, and that was certainly healthier than either the steak or baked potato (actually that whole meal which added pan fried chicken thighs and baked sweet potato was healthier than the steak/potato combo-more fiber, more vitamins, less saturated fat, more antioxidants, and probably more good fat as I used x-virg olive oil in the okra).

So long as the ingredient list of whatever it is you are eating is made up of food, it's fine. Even some of the unidentifiable shelf extenders are not bad: they mean less waste. I am more into not wasting food than I am into making sure I get lots of fresh or "never frozen" anything. I tend to get a lot of frozen veggies, canned tomatoes and dried beans/grains because they keep for ever. I run through onion, carrots and celery like crazy, and other root veggies have long shelf lives, so I can get those in the produce section, but I don't like waste, and the first thing mentioned was to throw away a bunch of food.

Pretentious, wasteful, earth-hating, holier-than-thou type idiots.