NutritionQuarterly_Summer2020

You’ve heard about them, we’re sure that you’ve eaten them and you’ve probably even shopped in the market (no relation – sorta), but what the heck are whole foods anyway? Whole foods are foods that are unprocessed or minimally processed. They come more from nature than they do a manufacturing facility, and are free of chemicals, additives, and preservatives. Whole foods include plant-based foods like fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts, seeds, fungi, legumes, and animal-based foods like poultry, meat, fish, and eggs. The bottom line is that if you can find it in nature and don’t do much to it before you eat it, you’re eating whole foods. Seems pretty simple, right? The reason that whole foods are a buzz-worthy, trending topic these days is that there has been a pendulous swing away from the eating habits that people from my generation had become accustomed to. I’m 46 (at time of publication) and I grew up on heavily sugared cereal breakfasts, Chef Boyardee lunches and Swanson Hungry Man dinners. Somewhere in the array of neon colored loops, canned pasta and frozen Salisbury steak, we gained convenience, but lost nutrition. Honestly, with the exception of my grandmother’s cooking, everything that I ate until I moved out at 17 was processed, packaged and mostly pathetic. We were the generation of margarine, not butter. We were the first generation of the microwave. Those cans of barely green, French Cut green beans and syrupy fruit cocktails still haunt my nightmares. Looking back, and because of the industry in which I work, I can see a lot of the factors that contributed to the over-processing of most of the food in my young life. One factor was the greater presence of women in the workplace. Both of my parents worked, so fast, easy, processed meals were, well…fast and easy. It was also a time when big agribusiness started gobbling up small farms, mechanizing processes and getting more and more packaged foods distributed nationwide. Superhighways and proliferation of air travel meant that we had foods available to us year-round instead of just seasonally. Basically, we were modernizing, but that didn’t mean it was for the better. THE WHOLE TRUTH A LOOK AT WHOLE FOODS Written by Owen Rothstein for Simple Again 8 Nutrition Quarterly · 2020 – Volume 3 What We’re Reading