Thursday, July 24, 2008

processed foods

I've just had a wee squizz round the internet on processed foods, thinking about how to define them. The ones pointing out that milk is a highly processed food made me realise I was going to have to create my own working definition or allowable/rejects list.

Then I found this sentence:
If the food did not exist in pre-industrial times, don’t eat it.

Perhaps this would serve me well? I am thinking of not eating any processed foods for one week. But I'm going to have to play around for a while before I get my own useful definition of exactly what I am working to avoid.

So yesterday, which didn't on the outset strike me as a truly exceptional day until I did some tallying, here are the foods which I ate which I wish to rule out (I ate good stuff as well but have left that out)
1 sausage roll
1 bottle of fruit juice
3 pineapple lumps
2 pieces of gorgeous home made Russian fudge
some salt and vinegar chips (crisps)

I had a pint of Guinness with the chips but I'm not yet sure that I'll specifically rule out alcohol this week. Actually Favourite Handyman and I drank Guinness in the pub on the way home from work while leaving our young children in childcare. If you need a mother to disapprove of, here I am. I did go to the school PTA meeting later on though.

My off list:
no bought pizza, no potato chips or chocolate or sweets
no soft drink
no muesli bars

That's all I think for now. I have this suspicion that I think I don't eat these things whereas in fact I do, but they slip in underneath my consciousness radar.

2 comments:

Rach said...

My friends has a similar guideline - if you can't make it yourself, don't eat it.
That means the Russian fudge was OK;-)

Gill said...

I'll quietly put my hand up as another mother to be disaaproved of. I pruned in the garden all morning while letting the DVD player babysit the boy. About the processed food "if your grandparents wouldn't recognise it, don't eat it" I don't know where I heared that but it's stuck with me. That would mean the fudge was OK but the milk should have come straight from the cow. You have to be practicle though don't you?