Grist tells us that there are five packaged foods we should never buy: soup, soup stock, canned beans, hummus and cereal. Noble ideas, but tough to implement in practice. For instance, I love Cheerios, and there's no way that I'm going to be making my own Cheerios. Now, I suspect that this point was made for those people that eat "sugar cereals" and not those with whole grains - the article specifically mentions sugared wheat cereals. On the other hand, I already make my own granola and combine the Cheerios with the granola, so i'm basically already meeting the Gristers halfway.
The other points are intriguing and I may take them up on this challenge. In fact, I bought a bag of beans this weekend rather than canned beans so we'll see how this works - so far, I've been forgetting to soak the beans so there hasn't been any chili on my table for the last few days. It all comes down to planning and priorities, which can be tough to do for two working parents with two children.
What do you think? Any processed foods that you make a point to avoid?
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2 comments:
This article's title is all wrong. It should be "Five things I make myself (and you can too, if you want)."
I mean, kudos to the author for making these things herself. But that has nothing to do with whether I should make them myself.
It's not like the processed foods she identified are especially bad for human consumption. Take the canned beans. Yeah, I get it, there's BPA in the cans. But I can still think of about 900 processed foods that are worse for you.
But I agree with her on one thing. Make your own soup. Unless its tomato soup. That's better from a can.
Joel, you make a great point. Too much of the environmental moment in my opinion is founded on guilt, and this not only prevents the message from being as effective as it could be, but also can be detrimental. For example, I think part of the reason that conservatives as a whole are so against environmentalism is because they have a visceral reaction to this type of guilt ("How dare you tell me what I should or shouldn't do!?!!") If these points were made along the lines you express, they'd probably be accepted much more freely because it involves logical reasons (bad things in canned food!)
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