Stop Blogging and Cook

The US can’t solve its problem, and it is the biggest economy in the world.  ~Luiz Vicente Berti, president of the Brazilian Society of Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery

CHOOSE GOOD-FOR-YOU FOODS
Sorry, there’s just no other way.

Salt is a big issue, made problematic by a food industry that cares more about people buying more of their products than by making anything resembling a healthy food worthy of human consumption.  So we get lots of salt and they get lots of profit.  The problem is now that Americans are addicted to salt and actually crave increasing amounts, and taste buds can only recognize salt rather than flavors found in real food, herbs and spices.

The Slow Food USA Blog reports on the state of the table, with respect to salt.  Commenting on the report from the Institute of Medicine about the failure of industry and government to contain American’s intake of salt,  the article gives a pithy summation:

Here’s the most important thing you’ll learn about salt today: only 11% of the sodium that we eat comes from the salt shakers in our kitchens or on our tables, but a whopping 77% of it comes from processed foods and restaurant foods.  Why so much salt? Food industry scientists say that without salt, processed food tastes like “cardboard” and “damp dog hair.”  Adding lots of salt is the cheapest and easiest way to make it palatable.

Mmmmmm.  Does that make you want to run right out and eat some processed restaurant food?  There is a better way.  Your body may be talking to you.  Perhaps you should listen.

My own experience is that fast food, processed food products and a lot of restaurant food tastes only of salt.  This is actually a good thing because the body naturally recognizes unholy amount of sodium, and taste buds are a natural defense mechanism warning of the danger of eating such a poor excuse for flavoring.  But if those sensors have become paralyzed from eating too much salt every day for years and years they can no longer recognize that danger. To those addicted to salt, the food tastes okay.  Another way that the body can warn of too much sodium in the system is a powerful thirst after eating over-salted food.  If the body doesn’t experience this reaction its early warning system has begun to shut down.  Ignore the body and invite extreme health consequences.

The human biosystem is a powerful tool that will give us feedback if we listen to it.  Addictions override system alarms.  Eating real food is the only way to retrain the body to respond as intended.  And that means knowing what’s in the food you eat.  And that means cooking and feeding yourself.  The food industry does not want to change it’s ways, so it’s up to us to feed ourselves good-for-you foods.  There’s just no other way out of the catastrophe that is the American food way today.  The acronym for Standard American Diet says it all.  It’s SAD.

TRUER WORDS WERE NEVER SPOKEN
The quote at the top is from an article on Michele Simon’s blog, An Appetite for Profit.  It seems as though the food giant Nestlé is going all out to try and capture the Brazilian market of consumers who are brand-deprived.  In the language of Wall Street analysis, here’s how Bloomberg.com describes their mission:

[T]he world’s largest food company will soon “begin sailing a supermarket barge down two Amazon river tributaries as it competes with Unilever to reach emerging-market customers cut off from branded goods.”

This wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t targeting the poor, people who raise their own food, have precious few resources, and are better off left alone to decide what to eat.  Brand-deprived, indeed.  We should be so lucky.  Nestlé hasn’t done anything this irresponsible since it sold infant formula to third world countries with precious little clean drinking water.  That marketing effort earned them a decade-long boycott.  I say it’s time for another one.

PROTEST GLOBAL FOOD INTRUSION
It’s enough to make you want to give up eating in protest of the madness of it all.  Today’s Meatless Monday preparation is so simple a seven-year-old can do it.  Cook some whole grain pasta in a pot of boiling filtered water with a little sea salt.  Drain.  Toss  a tablespoon of fresh-made pesto from your local market into the pasta until coated.  Sit down and enjoy, content in the knowledge that you can afford the imaginative and bazaar food products created in scientific laboratories and delivered to your grocery store shelves.  And then don’t buy them.  Spend your money on real food that has identifiable ingredients from local sources.

PESTO!
Your local grocery market has fresh-made pesto, probably found along with their refrigerated pastas or maybe in the cheese department.  Seek it out.  It is made from basil, garlic, and a dash of sea salt  that are crushed together with a mortar and pestle.  Add chopped pine nuts.  Olive oil is then whipped in to give it a creamy consistency.  Gadget enthusiasts use a food processor to make pesto in an instant.  Pesto is best eaten within a few days of purchase because it doesn’t have any preservatives.  In fact, if the label lists anything that you don’t recognize in your pantry, keep looking.

Pesto isn’t hard to make – you could throw it together using just the few sentences I’ve given here if you wanted to try it.  Or do it this way:  toss sautéed onions, mushrooms, garlic into the cooked pasta; then toss in chopped basil and some pine nuts.  The heat of the pasta will wilt the basil nicely.  Sprinkle with a little grated Reggiano or Peccorino cheese.  Serve with a Steamed Vegetable or  Tossed Salad of whatever produce is fresh from the market  and you have a meal fit for any person interested in satisfying their taste buds and their biosystem.

Rejoice in the fact that you’ve dined without supporting the likes of Nestlé, the giant food corporation bent on exploiting developing cultures, and won’t stop until the world is plied with their unnatural mukhwa of processed food products, draining personal resources and shortening lives on every continent.

Tags: Big Food, good for you food, health, healthy choices, pesto, real food, salad, salt, shopping, vegetarian, whole food