Monday, April 26, 2010

Bad News Bears

When I started this journey, the basic rules I chose to live by were:

1) Don't eat anything containing ingredients my great-grandmother Genevieve wouldn't recognize as a food.  (Rephrased: don't eat anything containing ingredients I wouldn't keep in my own kitchen.)

2) Eat fresh and local as much as possible.

3) Avoid meats from sources I'm unfamiliar with.

4) Take one exception meal a week.

The problem with #2 and #3, of course, is that I qualified them.  It's hard to eat fresh and local in Chicago in winter without dining out at ridiculously expensive boutique farm-to-table restaurants every day.  And aside from the stuff I get from Crystal, my farmer, I'm really never quite sure where meats are coming from.  Since I don't want to be a de-facto vegetarian, this means that every time I eat out, I'm in a sense breaking one of the rules.  So if I eat out more than once, I'm overloading on #4.

Rule #1 was the only hard and fast one.

Then came this:



You can't possibly convince me that Fritos are unprocessed.  They are the VERY SOUL of processed.  So Rule #1 clearly needs a little rephrasing.

Why is this all so hard??

2 comments:

  1. Hi Juliet! Your post prompted me to search online and see if I could figure out they get oil out of corn... I'm still not sure but it definitely involves large factories, chemical solvents, and lots of processing. And they didn't figure out how to do it until 1893- not sure if that qualifies as great grandmother time or not. Olive oil, on the other hand, has been around for over 5000 years. Thanks for you blog and making me think :)

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  2. There is almost no chance that the corn in Fritos isn't genetically modified. That's processing at it's worst, if you ask me.

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