stop eating processed food

1. Shop well. Make sure you buy fresh produce, poultry, fish, dairy, eggs, bread, pasta, rice, etc. at least two times a week. If you don’t have fresh food in the house, you’ll have to resort to fast processed stuff.

2. Cook. If you don’t know how, then learn. Processed food makes life very easy for those of us who can’t cook. Home-made food, however, is better and tastier. It also doesn’t take that much time to prepare as the processed food companies want us to believe. A good dinner from fresh, unprocessed ingredients can take anything between 10 minutes to 4 hours. It all depends on how complex you want it to be.

3. Learn to make staples at home. Jar your own pickles. Make a chocolate syrup(for pancakes, f’ex) from scratch. Bake bread. It’s easy, it’s fun, it’s fresh and tasty, and it’s free from all the nasty stuff that the food industry puts in our food.

For those of us in the process of giving up proccessed food. I’ve read (and enjoyed) them, so maybe you could too :)

1. Fast Food Nation – Eric Schlosser (the meat industry)

2. The Omnivore’s Dilamma – Michael Pollan (tracking down the corporate and industrial source of our food. More academic than “Fast Food Nation”, but very intersting and worth your time.)

This goal is proving more difficult than I had originally thought. So I gave up frozen fried chicken, mayo, industrial hummus and chocolate. Good for me, but today I noticed that the local bakeries add chemicals to my bread. Bread! Can’t I even buy simple bread anymore? Not that I can’t bake, but well, hmm, this is absolutely crazy. I expect to be able to buy at least the basic foods free of industrial garbage in them. Luckily the local dairies don’t use anything but salt to process their cheeses.

The only processed food that’s proving difficult to eliminate so far is the chocolate. I want to have some once a month only or less, and take it from there. We’ll see how I do next week.

Processed food constitutes about 10-40% of of my diet, depending on how one defines “processed food”. I eat lots of fruits and vegetables, bread, potatoes, rice, much dairy (some processed yogurts that have to go, but otherwise just milk and cheese), little eggs, very little fresh chicken, sometimes processed (fried) chicken breasts.

I usually don’t anything from a box. Eww. I either cook from absolutely scratch (basic, fresh, ingredients), or I make a sandwich with some cheese/eggs and vegetables. (The only exception being the damned processed chicken breasts).

Does chocolate count? I’m not sure I want to give up my occasional Lindt Pistachio treat (1-2 cubes a month).

Things I want to completely drop from my diet:
- non-fresh/processed spices
- Processed chicken breasts
- Sweetened yogurts
- Industrial hummus (learn to make hummus on my own?)
- Mayonaise