Picture a wholesome meal: lots of veggies, maybe some pastured meat or free-range eggs, lovingly cooked at home from scratch. Do a quick count of how many of your meals from the past week looked like that. Close to zero? You’re not alone.
Our world is full of processed food, for better or worse. It’s easy to sit at my keyboard and tell you to avoid it and eat foods in forms closest to how they are in nature: apples, not apple pie. But just because something is “processed” (whatever that means) doesn’t automatically make it bad for you.
It’s time to lose the guilt and own up to eating processed food sometimes—and maybe we’ll see it’s not that bad.
Don’t Obsess Over How Processed Each Food Is
Here’s the hard part: defining processed food. Doritos, processed. Not a tough call there. Raw potato with the dirt still on it: unprocessed. So far so good.
But if we wash that potato, boil it, maybe peel it too...mix it with butter, and garlic (and then more butter, and more garlic)—uh-oh. That’s kind of processed, isn’t it? But it’s not very processed, you might say. There’s a spectrum, and if you dig a potato out of the ground and boil it in your own kitchen, that’s still on the okay side.
The problem comes when you try to draw a line to say these things are processed, and these things aren’t. Where would you put a cow that’s been chopped up into steaks? Vegetables that are frozen? Beans that are canned? Bread baked by a local baker? Bread baked by a factory?
To get an idea of why this isn’t an easy question, take a look at how Megan Kimble describes her year without processed food:
For the purposes of my year, a food was unprocessed if I could theoretically make it in my own kitchen... If I wanted to make table sugar at home, I’d need a centrifuge, bleach, and a few de-clumping additives; honey required only figuring out how to collect the plant nectar that bees regurgitate onto honeycombs. I didn’t brew beer, but I theoretically could have; I gave up soda and bought myself a SodaStream for my bubbly fix.
Sure, it takes a lot more work and machinery to process sugar than to harvest honeycomb and extract the honey, but that’s kind of beside the point of which is healthier for you. There is no major nutritional difference between the two. And if her SodaStream drinks were healthier, that would have more to do with the ingredients of the syrup than the fact it was made at home. SodaStream offers everything from no-calorie seltzer to DIY Pepsi.
Taken to an extreme, the processed-is-bad mentality would put plenty of things off-limits that shouldn’t be. Frozen veggies are as healthy as fresh, sometimes more so. Pasteurized milk is processed, and better for it. There’s no solid nutritional reason to shun jarred pasta sauce, or egg whites in a carton, or rotisserie chicken.
