Processed foods

[Blithe Morning]

Disclaimer:

One of the great benefits of No S is that no food is off limits. However, those of us who have been on the diet a while have realized that in becoming more intentional about quantity, we are more aware of quality.

If you are still working on the quantity aspect, please don't let this thread derail you from establishing that first.

Ok.

In another thread we started talking about processed foods and sodium. Since I am "pre-hypertensive" and high blood pressure in women is on both sides of my family, I feel I need to be pro-active about this.

I am going to feel foolish saying this, but I think I know what processed foods are, but I'm not really sure. Fast food, naturally. And probably most of the foods you get at chain restaurants. Stuff in cans, like soup and maybe beans. Lunch meats? Bacon. Sausage. What else?

[kwonset]

I'd probably include most frosen entrees---(sorry the last letter of the alphabet is broken on my keyboard), but not frosen plain veggies. They are quite okay. Also some bottled salad dressings are high in sodium. For me, anything over 300-400 milligrams per serving I try to avoid. Canned soups unless they are made to be low in sodium are often very high. I usually don't cook with salt and don't add it at the table; I use other spices, or the 'Dash' spice mixes.

[jbettin]

Here's a tip if you'd like to avoid "cream of..." soups in your cooking. One of the blogs I read (in my constant effort to maintain a frugal but healthy diet) has a "magic mix" that she uses to make a substitute for canned soup. It uses non-instant powdered milk, but you could use the regular Carnation stuff if you use double the amount. It allows you to have total control over the sodium content of your cream soups and, if you use Smart Balance, you can even avoid unhealthy fats.

Here's the link: http://everydayfoodstorage.net/2008/05/ ... ge-recipes

(Scroll down toward the bottom for the magic mix recipe.)

[geekmom]

The Globe & Mail, a national Canadian newspaper, recently published a series of in-depth articles about sodium and how it can be a hidden danger in our diets. Quite fascinating reading; I was surprised to learn that one of the worst "problem foods" for sodium is breakfast cereal!

Here is a link to the first article in the series:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/special- ... le1188881/

I understand about not being sure what constitutes processed food. Seems like so much of what we eat undergoes SOME type of processing these days! Even a bag of raw rice is processed, if you think about it. When I first started working on improving the quality of my diet I found it extremely helpful to think in terms of whole foods (ie, foods as close to their natural state as possible). Look critically at the groceries you buy to ask yourself if you could make a switch to something that is more of a whole food. For instance, cooking your own potatoes instead of a bag of frozen french fries or buying natural, plain yogurt and adding some berries and honey instead of buying pre-sweetened flavoured yogurt. Doing stuff like this really helps you to know exactly what is in your food and avoid hidden stuff like sodium and transfats.

Hope this helps!

[NoelFigart]

Disclaimer:
I am going to feel foolish saying this, but I think I know what processed foods are, but I'm not really sure. Fast food, naturally. And probably most of the foods you get at chain restaurants. Stuff in cans, like soup and maybe beans. Lunch meats? Bacon. Sausage. What else?

That's not foolish, in my opinion. It's a legitimate question!

If it comes in a box, unless it's a whole grain, it's processed. That said, steel cut oats and Cheerios are very different to my mind. If a "processed" food has one ingredient, I think that's probably just fine.

I cook a LOT more than the average American, and cook from scratch more often than even most people who cook frequently. While I avoid a lot of processed food, I'm not fanatic about it. It's simply a natural consequence of cooking mostly with fresh ingredients. I don't hand-make pasta every time I eat it. (I let my family beg). I do eat lunch meat 2-3 times a week. I buy bread more often than I bake it. If I'm eating Mexican, I do buy tortillas. If I have pierogies, I buy 'em.

What I don't buy are spice mixes, canned soups, frozen meals (though I do buy frozen veggies often in the winter), most baked treats (I LIKE to bake), "energy" bars, those abominable FROOT snax...

It's not a health fantatic thing, though. It's just a natural consequence of the fact I'm an adequate cook, got polish on my cooking ability by living with a chef for seven years, and it's as much a hobby as a necessity.

[wosnes]

You're right about fast food and food at chain restaurants. The higher end chains (Cheesecake Factory, Maggiano's, various steakhouses, etc) aren't quite as bad because they often rely less on pre-made or processed ingredients. I've gotten really picky about restaurants and try to avoid the chains and frequent those that make their own food from scratch. Some "mom and pop" places cook from scratch. Steakhouses in general are fairly decent.

When I buy groceries the rule is: Buy ingredients. Avoid mixes of any kind and just about anything that is ready-to-eat. I do just the opposite of Sandra Lee's Semi-Homemade. I call my cooking style Mostly Homemade and use 70% (or more) fresh ingredients and 30% (or less) ready-made products, including condiments. Canned goods are high in sodium and I use very little, but I do use canned tomato products -- and not the low-salt variety. I used to use canned beans, but I've since started cooking them from dry. Many condiments are high in salt, but I think because they're generally used in small amounts, they're not so problematic.

Cheeses are high in sodium, but I use them like a condiment. As for bacon and sausage, yea, they're high in sodium (Here's a surprise -- turkey bacon is quite a bit higher in sodium than regular bacon. Regular bacon is better!), but I do use them occasionally.

[jbettin]

When I buy groceries the rule is: Buy ingredients. Avoid mixes of any kind and just about anything that is ready-to-eat. I do just the opposite of Sandra Lee's Semi-Homemade. I call my cooking style Mostly Homemade and use 70% (or more) fresh ingredients and 30% (or less) ready-made products, including condiments. Canned goods are high in sodium and I use very little, but I do use canned tomato products -- and not the low-salt variety. I used to use canned beans, but I've since started cooking them from dry. Many condiments are high in salt, but I think because they're generally used in small amounts, they're not so problematic.

I do the same thing, and it saves a BOATLOAD of money. Many homemade items aren't even that hard -- salad dressing, for instance, is a complete no-brainer. (1 part vinegar to 3 parts oil, plus your favorite herbs) Sometimes the time savings for processed items is an illusion anyway. For instance, how long does it really take to mix flour and baking powder to wind up with "pancake mix"?

[wosnes]

When I buy groceries the rule is: Buy ingredients. Avoid mixes of any kind and just about anything that is ready-to-eat. I do just the opposite of Sandra Lee's Semi-Homemade. I call my cooking style Mostly Homemade and use 70% (or more) fresh ingredients and 30% (or less) ready-made products, including condiments. Canned goods are high in sodium and I use very little, but I do use canned tomato products -- and not the low-salt variety. I used to use canned beans, but I've since started cooking them from dry. Many condiments are high in salt, but I think because they're generally used in small amounts, they're not so problematic.

I do the same thing, and it saves a BOATLOAD of money. Many homemade items aren't even that hard -- salad dressing, for instance, is a complete no-brainer. (1 part vinegar to 3 parts oil, plus your favorite herbs) Sometimes the time savings for processed items is an illusion anyway. For instance, how long does it really take to mix flour and baking powder to wind up with "pancake mix"?

Not only are the homemade things not that hard, in many cases they take no more time (or only a little more time) than the "convenience" products that replace them. There are a few exceptions to that rule -- bread comes to mind.

I make my own salad dressings, too, using a slightly different formula.

[Nichole]

I just made homemade pancakes a few weeks ago and it's amazing! Yum! So far my favorite homemade dressing I've tried I found in a recipe for greek salad. It's

1/3 cup red-wine vinegar
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon chopped fresh dill or oregano or 1 teaspoon dried
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper

Dunno how healthy it is, but it sure is delicious! I don't measure exactly anymore, just kind of throw it together.

[Thalia]

Baking mixes in particular are an incredible rip-off. I was astounded the first time I made cornbread and muffins -- it is literally no harder than opening the box!

In addition to bread, phyllo pastry is darn hard to make yourself. And homemade pasta is yummy, but it's a huge production and I don't do it that often.

[Nichole]

I enjoy making homemade breads and pizza crusts, but I would never venture into homemade pasta territory, lol!

[Thalia]

Pasta's not as hard as you'd think, but it IS a lot of work! I can rarely be bothered.

[NoelFigart]

Homemade pasta is hardly as esoteric as you might think, Nicole! If you can make homemade bread, I promise you could handle homemade pasta.

Good bread is a lot harder. My 14 year old son can make his own homemade pasta and he's not much of a cook otherwise.

http://italianfood.about.com/od/pastare ... lr0001.htm

[jbettin]

Good bread is a lot harder.

IMO, once you get the hang of it, I don't find that good bread is hard. I make 4 loaves at a time about once/week, and over the years that I've doing that, I've found it to be pretty forgiving stuff. It does take time, but it's largely "time, not attention". Even if you mess up and let it over-proof on the second rising, you can always punch it down and let it rise one more time. I use a very basic recipe for whole wheat bread, and then play with various flours, adding goodies like ground flax, etc. etc.

My motto with stuff like this is "be not afraid" -- if I mess up a batch, it's usually not to the point that it's utterly inedible. A complete disaster is a pretty rare thing.

King Arthur Flour has a ton of recipes on their web site, if you want a good place to start.

[NoelFigart]

I live within 5 miles of King Arthur. All Hail the Flour Goodness.

And no, I don't find bread hard, either! But for a breadmaker to fear making pasta?

BWAHAHAHAHA! No need. No need at all.

[wosnes]

This thread reminds me of something I read in the companion book to the movie Food, Inc. It's a book of essays by some of the people who were involved in the movie or who have similar interests:

...Americans graze through the kitchen, popping precooked, heat-and-eat, bar-coded packages into the microwave for eating on the run.

That treatment doesn't work well with real food. Real heritage food needs to sliced, peeled, sauteed, marinated, pureed, and a host of other things that require true culinary skills. Back in the early 1980s when our farm began selling pastured poultry, nobody even asked for boneless, skinless breast. To be perfectly sexist, every mom knew how to cut up a chicken. That was generic, cultural mom information. Today, half of the moms don't know that a chicken even has bones...

...The indigenous knowledge base surrounding food is largely gone. When "scratch" cooking means actually opening a can, and when church and family reunion potlucks include buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken, you know our culture has suffered a culinary information implosion. Big time. Indeed, according to marketing surveys, roughly seventy percent of Americans have no idea what they are having for supper at 4:00 PM. That's scary.

...As a culture, if ass we did was rediscover our kitchens and quit buying prepared foods, it would fundamentally change the industrial food system. The reason I'm leading this discussion with that option is because too often the foodies and the greenies seem to put the onus for change on the farmers. But this is a team effort, and since farmers do not even merit Census Bureau recognition, non-farmers must ante up to the responsibility for change. And both moms and dads need to reclaim the basic food preparation knowledge that was once the natural inheritance of every human being.(bold italics mine)

Not only did the moms know how to bone a chicken, they knew how to can, bake bread, make noodles, pie crust and so on. Some moms knew how to make puff pastry. And some real brave ones knew how to make phyllo dough! Some still do.

I read a lot of cooking blogs and I'm shocked at the number of people who don't know how to do much of anything in the kitchen -- and are afraid to attempt it. Or don't know that you can omit ingredients you don't like and substitute others. Yes, the dish will taste different -- not bad, but different. It will be "yours." That's how there came to be thousands of variations of whatever!

None of it is particularly difficult, though practice makes perfect -- or closer to it. The worst thing about cooking from scratch is that it's time-consuming.

[NoelFigart]

Well, I buy whole chickens frequently. I do that to let my Inner Scrooge come out to play because they're often sold for less than a dollar a pound. Wasted money on bones? Come on, I'm the soup and stock queen. That stuff is gold to in Mama Noel's kitchen!

I know HOW to cut up a chicken, but I freely admit I often just roast the sucker and make carcass soup later.

That brings up an interesting point. Now, really, cooking is my hobby as well as a frugal necessity (scratch cooking is CHEAP). But, menu planning is a necessity for this.

I used to live in a rather alternative home, where we had four adults and two children (call it a commune). We used to have a rotating menu of some 20-odd dishes that I'd put into my Outlook calendar at the appropriate interval. I still do this for my smaller household. It's great.

A) You never get bored. Seriously. Most people serve the same seven or so dishes all the time. My present menu planner has 26 dishes. Try thinking up that many sometime!

B) Shopping is EASY with this. You know EXACTLY what you need and how much per week. It doesn't prevent stocking up on sales. In fact, it helps, because you won't be tempted to stock up on what you don't USE.

C) It sounds limiting, but it's not. Children know that favorite meals WILL pop up at regular intervals, it makes prepping easier and you don't stand around wondering what in HELL you can pull together for dinner. (Hey, we've all done that).

[maslowjenkins]

I think In Defense of Food says something about avoiding foods that have more than 4 or 5 ingredients. I try to avoid things that have preservatives. Once I'm pretty compliant with No-S, I can tell the preservatives are there and won't want to choose it--I'd rather make from scratch chocolate chip cookies versus ready made dough, for example.

[wosnes]

Menu planning is something else Salatin mentioned. And there's no law that says you can't change things around now and again. Rotate something out and something else in. Maybe it's a seasonal thing, or maybe you just get tired of "x" and want to substitute "y.

The 4-5 ingredients sounded good to me, too, but then I realized that a lot of my recipes have more ingredients -- especially soups. But I do think all of the ingredients should be recognizable, that is, no chemicals and additives.

[Nichole]

Well it's not that I can't make homemade pasta, it's that I don't want to :p lol

[NoelFigart]

Well it's not that I can't make homemade pasta, it's that I don't want to :p lol

*grin* Gotcha.

I often don't. In fact, it's gonna be linguine out of a box tonight.

[maslowjenkins]

The 4-5 ingredients sounded good to me, too, but then I realized that a lot of my recipes have more ingredients -- especially soups. But I do think all of the ingredients should be recognizable, that is, no chemicals and additives.

additives and preservatives is what he was gettin at in the book. If all your ingredients are real food, then that's great!

here's a personal example: I had a coupon for Dean's guacomole dip and it was on sale, so I thought I'd try it. After all, I love guacomole. I picked up the container and looked at the ingredients:


Skim Milk, Soybean Oil, Tomatoes, Water, Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil (Coconut Oil, Safflower and/or Corn Oil), Eggs, Distilled Vinegar, Avocado Pulp, Onions, Salt, Nonfat Dry Milk, Egg Yolks, Lactic Acid, Sugar, Whey, Sodium Caseinate, Mono and Diglycerides, Gelatin, Soy Protein Isolate, Xanthan Gum, Corn Starch, Guar Gum, Mustard Flour, Black Pepper, Red Chili Pepper, Potassium Sorbate and Sodium Benzoate (Added to Retard Spoilage), Coriander, Lemon Juice Concentrate, Cellulose Gel, Cellulose Gum, Locust Bean Gum, Disodium Phosphate, Cilantro, Gum Arabic, Extractives of Garlic and Black Pepper, Paprika Oil, Oregano, Thyme, Bay Leaf, Calcium Chloride, Citric Acid, Dextrose, Artificial Color (FD&C Blue No. 1, FD&C Red No. 40, FD&C Yellow No. 5, FD&C Yellow No. 6).

YIKES! When I make guacomole, it is just avacados and some seasonings! Needless to say, I did not buy it.

And I'm not alone. While looking online for that list, I came across this website:
http://www.fooducate.com/blog/2009/05/0 ... amole-dip/

looks like a good site!

[Nichole]

I don't see much wrong with pasta, as long as it's not a huge quantity. I stick to a cup. I would love to try it one day though!

[Nichole]

And speaking of guac, I saw a recipe today for it on allrecipes.com (which is probably my favorite site next to Facebook) and it's so simple! Only like 3 ingredients.

[wosnes]

The 4-5 ingredients sounded good to me, too, but then I realized that a lot of my recipes have more ingredients -- especially soups. But I do think all of the ingredients should be recognizable, that is, no chemicals and additives.

additives and preservatives is what he was gettin at in the book. If all your ingredients are real food, then that's great!

here's a personal example: I had a coupon for Dean's guacomole dip and it was on sale, so I thought I'd try it. After all, I love guacomole. I picked up the container and looked at the ingredients:


Skim Milk, Soybean Oil, Tomatoes, Water, Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil (Coconut Oil, Safflower and/or Corn Oil), Eggs, Distilled Vinegar, Avocado Pulp, Onions, Salt, Nonfat Dry Milk, Egg Yolks, Lactic Acid, Sugar, Whey, Sodium Caseinate, Mono and Diglycerides, Gelatin, Soy Protein Isolate, Xanthan Gum, Corn Starch, Guar Gum, Mustard Flour, Black Pepper, Red Chili Pepper, Potassium Sorbate and Sodium Benzoate (Added to Retard Spoilage), Coriander, Lemon Juice Concentrate, Cellulose Gel, Cellulose Gum, Locust Bean Gum, Disodium Phosphate, Cilantro, Gum Arabic, Extractives of Garlic and Black Pepper, Paprika Oil, Oregano, Thyme, Bay Leaf, Calcium Chloride, Citric Acid, Dextrose, Artificial Color (FD&C Blue No. 1, FD&C Red No. 40, FD&C Yellow No. 5, FD&C Yellow No. 6).

YIKES! When I make guacomole, it is just avacados and some seasonings! Needless to say, I did not buy it.

And I'm not alone. While looking online for that list, I came across this website:
http://www.fooducate.com/blog/2009/05/0 ... amole-dip/

looks like a good site!

Some of the real ingredients in the guacamole are things I'd never think about putting in it -- bay leaf, anyone?

I've been enjoying this site lately:
http://www.foodrenegade.com/

[buttercreampillow]

I don't even like tomatoes in my guac, never mind a bunch of chemicals. Guac has avocado, onions, lemon juice and salt. That's it for me.

I am fortunate to have grown up with a mom who cooked from scratch, so that's how I think cooking is done. We never ate canned anything, or any frozen food that wasn't a single veggie with no sauce or seasoning. My DBF has custody of his daughters and cooks everything from a mix, or as a frozen entree, or from cans. The girls even like potato flakes and canned veggies--Yech! Once we are married, he better not cook like that for me!

buttercreampillow

[NoelFigart]

Once we are married, he better not cook like that for me!

LOL. I can pretty much guarantee he's going to.

Mebbe you should be the cook.

[buttercreampillow]

I'm kidding. I will be the cook! (He will clean the bathrooms and vacuum!)