If we had just one rule for the foods we ate, it could be this: Start with single ingredient foods that still look the way they did when they came off the plant.
If we wanted apple and pear juice, we would start with apples and pears and juice them. If we wanted potato chips, we’d begin with potatoes and make them into crisps by slicing and baking. If we wanted bread we would start with wheat berries. Animal products would get the same treatment. Meat would be unprocessed (not corned, reformed or covered with marinade). Cheese would begin with milk. Butter would start with cream.
Now I don’t know about you, but that would sure slow me down. No more eating packets of corn chips almost without thinking. After as much time and effort as it would take to make them, I reckon I would savour every single crunchy delight.
And that is the point. If we had to start from scratch with everything and process it ourselves, it would drastically slow down our intake plus it would ensure that we were eating food we could recognise from its native state. We would be aware of exactly what went into each meal before it went into our mouths.
There’s always pain in trying a grand experiment like this. For me, it would be … if I wanted chocolate, I would have to start with cacao beans and sugarcane. And I’ve read enough about other people’s experiments to know that chocolate is hard to get right from scratch and often ends up grainy, which doesn’t give that subtle mouthfeel of excellent chocolate.
Obviously, this means we would have to think about our food more and take time over its preparation. But food preparation does take time and we have ignored that in our downward spiral of filling our supermarket trolleys with prepackaged, chemical-laden items that pass for food and buying fast food to eat on the run. We’ve also ignored the fact that simple foods—raw fruits, salad vegetables, eggs—actually don’t take long to prepare. So in a way, the much-vaunted sophistication of our tastes has robbed us of our good health.
If we followed the principle of eating food as close to its origins as possible, even most of the time, we would find our diet automatically being better. One simple rule would make the world of difference. And we’d steer clear of any recipe that starts with, open a jar of simmer sauce.