Food, Glorious Food?

I’m waiting on something that will result in a side-by-side post, but it’s not here yet.

So, instead, I’m getting on the bandwagon and doing a post related to food.

This arises out of a few things over the past week.

First, the other day, we finally managed to do my son’s birthday lunch at the only independent local Japanese restaurant. Every time we go there, we eat way too much. I had meant to take a picture but clearly got distracted.

So, we ate our way from seaweed salad through vegetable tempura, sushi and sashimi for him (I no longer participate in raw fish), and udon. Lord, I love udon noodles. They are such a perfect texture.

And then ice cream from the farm shop on the way home. Where we finally got to taste the hay ice cream. I had to ask for it. They were only offering it at one of the restaurants – not, strangely enough, at the ice cream counter. Anyway, it tastes gently hay-like (ie, sort of dry grass and sugar) and very sweet – indeed, sweeter than most of their other ice creams. Now that I’ve done that I don’t need to do it again.

Secondly, someone I’ve known for decades – never really a friend but more than an acquaintance – is doing one of those two-week fasting diets where you remove everything that might be a ‘trigger’ from your diet and then slowly add things back to see what causes issues (I think this is the second time she’s doing it – not sure why she’s doing it again). She’s a sharing sort of person so I’m looking forward to hearing about what causes issues for her. I’m not being snarky – I’m genuinely curious.

Finally, I’m almost finished reading a fascinating and horrifying book about food and the non-food foods we eat (ie, UPF – ultra processed food). It’s called Ultra Processed People and it’s by a guy named Chris van Tulleken (who is a scientist and a doctor, a food campaigner, and some other things too).

As you might guess from the title, the books focuses on the things we eat that aren’t really actually ‘food’, what these ‘not-really-foods’ are made up of, and the proportion of our diets that these ‘things’ now account for. Plus, how these sorts of things cause certain specific health issues, including immunological issues due to a mucked up gut.

Now, I can see some readers going either ho-hum or not-for-me, don’t wanna know – bye bye.  I get that. But, while some of what this guy writes about is unsurprising and we’ve likely known about it for ages, other bits were eye-opening for me, and these sent me on a food tizz.

Some of the non-food ‘things’ (additives, things that are included to give something ‘structure’) are just gross (I’m not going to give an example, but he talks a lot about textures and how companies get them). Others relate, for example, to things like soy. I try hard to stay away from this for specific health reasons and I know it’s a hard one, given it pops up in loads of things in loads of places. But one thing he discusses that was a bit of a lightbulb moment for me is that most chicken is now fed on a diet that is largely made up of soy. Meaning many of us ingest up to 60kg of soy a year simply from eating chicken fairly frequently. Most of my chicken comes from up-market grocery stores but I’m going to have a convo with the butchers at the farm shop about how the chicken they sell is fed and may well have to 1) move exclusively to their pricier stuff and 2) cut down on chicken all together. Sigh.

And don’t get him started on the margarine vs butter issue; the low-fat products where sugar replaced the fat content; and the changes in UPF when it became clear that one additive had to be removed for health reasons to be replaced with yet another, different sort of additive.

Plus, there’s a seriously hilarious, but also hugely unsettling section on Pringles.

I generally eat reasonably well, and cook or assemble most meals from ‘real’ food. But there have been the short cuts (eg, store-bought hummus which is waaay too smooooth – I have yet to figure out if there is a way to make my own hummus have the texture of mashed potatoes).

The biggest thing running through the book, though, is how these industrialised items are developed in such a way that they’re meant to be very hard to stop eating (there’s even a chapter entitled ‘UPF is designed to be overconsumed’). It isn’t only the sugar and salt (and fat) content – it’s what their chemical makeups do to the parts of your brain that in normal circumstances with ‘real’ food tell you you’re full. These ‘foods’ are able to override that.

As noted above, I know this isn’t a new story in food, but reading this book has had a major impact on me now for some reason. I guess – as I manoeuvre through middle age – I really do need to be much more conscious about what I’m putting into my body (vs, sigh, those early experiences of TV dinners, fast food fries, and Hostess Twinkies for lunch as a teenager). Conscious is, I guess, the operative word here.

Of course, this isn’t going to keep me away from Sara’s bakery on Saturday. Or the gourmet pizza van at the garden centre once a month. But these sorts of things are actually real food, made from real food things – it’s just a matter of staying away from similar things which definitely aren’t real food.

What about you and your relationship with food? How do you eat? Do you think this sort of material is the overreaction of pretentious weirdos and doom-mongers? Are you at the other end of the spectrum and very careful about what you eat? Somewhere in-between? Do tell.

Pics: Pexels and mine