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Why is whole food better than processed food
What do you eat? No. What do you really eat? If they have kale You stop at the store. But is it organic? Is it local? Is it in season? Do you even like kale? I get it, it's overwhelming. Two years ago, I maintain myself a challenge. One year without processed food. And what makes a food processed? And I'll get to those. But tonight I want to focus on that choice of a Wednesday night when you're wondering what to eat.
I'm a food writer, so on some level I'm paid to think about that choice. I'm the editor of Edible Baja Arizona, a local food magazine based here in Tucson. But I also believe that these choices matter.
That they impact the food system and that we have the power to unprocessed the foods we eat. So what makes a food processed? Of course, all foods are processed.
Agriculture is a kind of process. So is cooking, fermenting, dicing, preserving. All foods are processed and often they're better for it, but increasingly they are not. Study after study has shown that it is less important what we're eating than how we're eating it. Same source. Different foods because of their level of process. I spent a lot of time wrangling over the particulars, over the many things that we find in our ingredient labels these days. Quote from, of all people, Mr. Rogers, says there is a difference between things people make and things that are made. There is a difference between foods people make with their hands or could make, and foods that are made by machines.
People can make corn into corn tortillas. I wrote a book about it. But tonight I want to focus on just three processes. vegetables get from the ground in Mexico, that is to a grocery store in Arizona.
The second process food, how your body responds when you drink a glass of apple juice or eating an apple. And the third process is a little more complicated. It is the process of how the foods we buy impact the communities we live in. Often this process revolves around money. It is the economy of food, and it's this last one, that of consumer spending that I find the most potential for processing. Oh. So how does the food get from its source to your table? It is the largest inland port of entry in the US. In the winter, 70% of produce on supermarket shelves comes from Mexico and most of it comes through here. It is the Ellis Island for Mexican produce. So a watermelon? A watermelon get from the ground? And Hermosillo to a Safeway in Tucson? Well, it starts on a farm, a really big farm. A thousand acres of watermelon. A migrating field crew goes and harvests them. Within a day. They pack them up and put them on a semi truck, £40,000 of vegetables, and send them north to the border.
There are about 100 of them there, and I spend a few days wandering through these warehouses. And let me tell you, the scale is staggering. At this particular warehouse, during their high season, every single day they might move in and out 150,000 melons. I remember standing in this warehouse full of mangoes and it being inconceivable to me how this mass of fruit might ever just become one mango and one person's kitchen. The system is vast and its survival depends on pesticides, refrigeration, and semi trucks. Compare that to this.
This is what I eat. This is one week share from the Tucson CSA, the community supported agriculture program that I am a member of. This produce comes from a farm owned by owned by a guy named Frank. Yes. We call him farmer Frank. Frank sends his two employees in the field.
They harvest about 150 shares, and send it to Tucson. According to a study by the USDA. Almost 60% of conventionally grown produce still has is still contaminated with pesticides even after it's been washed.
That's not processed. What is? So you have these two watermelon, one from Moscow, one from near Tucson. What makes one more process than the other? Well, the first difference is how they're grown conventionally versus organically on a monoculture or on a diversified field. On average, $0.91 of every dollar we spend on food goes to middlemen. So when you buy food that's gone through this vast system, you are supporting that $0.91. On the other hand, when you buy food from a CSA or a farmer's market, you are helping ensure that the people who grow your own food get more than $0.09 on every dollar. So let's go to the second process. A lot of people ask me is eating unprocessed hard? Sugar is in everything. I will say I love sugar. I have such a voracious sweet tooth that when I was a kid, my mom instituted a rule called One sweet a day, in which I was allowed one sweet every day instead of all the sweets, all the days. So. But sugar is in everything. Apart from that, it is in, for example, blueberry flavored flax seed. The spinach of breakfast confections has sugar.
Brand of mustard is a mix of sugar, honey, and high fructose corn syrup in good measure. Grape-nuts, a seemingly sensible solution to breakfast, has four different kinds of sugar hidden on that ingredient label, and that's what makes sugar so tricky.
It comes in so many different forms, it's really hard to avoid. What matters to your body instead is quantity and speed.
How much sugar you're eating and how quickly it arrives to your system. So think about the difference between eating an apple and drinking a glass of apple juice and the apple. You really got to work to get that sugar. You got to bite it, chew it, swallow it. Apple juice, on the other hand, is immediate, and that immediacy stresses your body out. But the problem with sugar is that I'm not alone. We all really like it. It pulls our triggers in ways that make us want to eat more. And food companies know that. That's why it's in everything.
Unfortunately, there's been a lot of research in recent years that says that sugar is simply not good for us. So what do we do? What's the alternative? Well, one alternative is to eat less sugar or fake sugar. Diet. Desserts. The way that food companies make desserts diet is they process out the sugar and fat and replace it with chemicals so that your body thinks you're still getting the good stuff, that you're still getting your dessert. But anyone who's ever been on a diet knows that that simply doesn't work. Eat one brownie and you're going to want five more before you really full. Compare that to the sweets I ate during my year unprocessed homemade chocolate made with raw honey cookies made with whole grain flour and molasses and butter. These sweets satisfy my sweet craving. They filled me up and because they were all bound up in the foods with substance, they trickled into that sugar, trickled into my body slower.
A lot of people ask when I tell them about my year end process. My year of eating unprocessed food is how do you feel? Do you feel differently? For me, this is no small thing. I've dieted on and off my whole life. I've counted calories. I've done Weight Watchers, really. I've been through the wringer. But Unprocess is not a diet. When I eat in a process, I eat when I'm hungry and I stop eating when I'm full. During my year, I didn't gain weight and I didn't lose weight, but I ate a lot of delicious food. If there's one takeaway from sugar, it is that if you're going to eat something sweet, make it count. Savor it.
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Make it your one sweet a day. Don't waste your sugar on mustard. So let's move on to that last process. Let's go back to tonight. Wednesday night you're wondering what to eat. But when I started my year end process, I was a very busy graduate student, earning a graduate student salary of about $18,000 a year. I lived in this tiny little apartment. Without enough. Without enough shade to grow a basil plant. So throughout my year, I saved every grocery receipt for every run and run out purchase. So the grand total, the amount I spent to feed myself for my year end processed was about $4,900. It's out of their reach and I'm really interested in that. I dedicate the last chapter of my book to the endeavor of eating unprocessed on the amount of money that food stamp recipients receive, which is about $20 a week. This is the height of a sheep that I spent two days helping to slaughter, butcher and process using nothing but an eight inch craftsman knife. I've been a vegetarian on and off my whole life, problem always being I actually kind of like to eat meat, but I've read what we've all read how destructive. How could I eat meat in a way that seemed responsible? So I spent two days in very close quarters with this sheep. And here's the surprise it didn't turn me off meat. Instead, it made me so grateful that I could go to the farmer's market and pay a local rancher who had gone through this same process with the same reverence respect as I had, and get meat in return.
Indeed, if there's if there's one takeaway from my year end process, it is simply that the money you spend matters. We should all butcher our own meat, or grind our own grains or grow our own food. What I am saying is that when you do it, do it yourself. You realize it is so worth the money to pay someone in your community who is doing it well. According to a study by Local First Arizona, if everyone in a community the size of Tucson shifted 10% of their spending to a local business, together we would create $140 million in new revenue for the city. Spend $100 at Safeway and only $43 stays here. The importance of that is that of the importance of the money that we're keeping here is also that we are withholding it from the balance sheets of those multinational corporations who are then using it, our money to influence politics, to grow on sustainable food, to waste energy, in short, to process and sell those foods that aren't good for us. Whoops. But apart from all that, the reason that eating process makes sense to me is that it is simpler. I don't have to worry about where my food is coming from because I know where it's coming from. I don't have to worry about what it's doing to my body because I feel good. It's one rule, and then I don't have to think about it. I can do what I always wanted to do with food, which is simply enjoy it. It is to bring us together. We have the power to unprocess our food system. Of course we don't do anything. You do things and I do things. You go home to make dinner and I go home to make dinner. That big change begins to happen. So join the CSA. Read your ingredient labels. Go to the farmer's market. What do you eat? That's up to you. Thank you.