Lines In The Sand

I want to talk about food again.

You know, food is not a moral choice, even though people love to make everything a moral choice and it is exhausting that they do this; food is just food.  It isn't comfort, it isn't moral strength, it isn't 'good' or 'bad' (I detest the idea that there is 'bad' food), it isn't in and of itself a problem.  Food is a tool.  It's a necessity for life.  At its most basic food is a calorie and nutrient delivery system and the only reason it's considered a 'healthy' or 'unhealthy' choice at all is because some food contains more or less vitamins or minerals and calories.  If you need to gain weight then a high calorie food is a healthier food.  If you need to lose weight then a lower calorie food is healthier.  If you have high iron then obviously eating more high iron foods isn't healthy, even if most of society is going along saying you 'need lots of iron because it's healthy'.  Actually, for you, that would not be a healthy choice, choosing an accepted health food.

When you're eating, again at its most basic level, your body is trying to get calories to enable it to keep working.  Most of us in north american society are not having problems with this - we're probably all getting PLENTY of calories.  Indigenous people who were eating nuts and grubs and other fat heavy foods were eating them because they were high calorie foods.  If your diet is mostly low calorie foods, those fatty, higher calorie foods are much prized luxuries.  Living as if you were an indigenous person today would mean that you were eating a large amount of low calorie foods like leafy greens, interspersed with starchy tubers, the occasional fruit, and probably whatever meat you could catch - the most likely being insects and small animals and fish.  There isn't a lot of fat on, say, a rabbit.

On top of these all important calories your body needs certain nutrients - vitamins and mineral - in order to function.  Many of these it needs at a very low level and the occasional item with that nutrient is sufficient.  In addition to this some of those nutrients are water soluble and some are fat soluble - so sometimes you need to in fact be constantly ingesting some of these nutrients for your body to have access to them in the foods you're eating and sometimes you do not - your body can store them for you to use later.  We have all heard the stories of the kid who ate only ramen noodles and died - that's the sort of story that people use in order to scare you about nutrients.  In reality, providing you aren't dealing with a health condition, and you ate a sufficient amount of ramen, I can't personally see any reason why it wouldn't keep you alive for probably a long time.

Some of those nutrients have been labelled 'bad', like sodium, which is a very important mineral that our body does in fact need to function normally, but since it's prevalent in a lot of food in great abundance we've now decided it is  'bad' and we should all avoid it as much as possible.  Calcium, also important, is also really really prevalent in an omnivorous diet these days - in all dairy products, plus an additive in a lot of foods, plus normally occurring in greens and other foods - but since we haven't linked calcium to any bad reactions yet, it's a 'good' nutrient and we're all supposed to consume as much as possible.

Except that sodium isn't bad and calcium isn't good, they're just sodium and calcium, just like a broom isn't bad because it raises dust that might bother an asthmatic.

Anyway, when I talked about cooking whole foods for my family again, and mentioned eating a lot of frozen prepared foods previously, I wasn't saying one of those things was better than the other.  Because they aren't.  There are lots of good reasons to eat a variety of foods - the fibre content is likely higher and that helps your digestion, you have a varied palate and that will make eating more pleasurable for you and make you a much nicer guest, you'll have an easier time staying in budget, you will probably not have to resort to a multi-vitamin just in case you weren't getting enough of something - but a frozen lasagna isn't a good or bad decision.  It's just a lasagna.