Sane Eating in Columbus follows Matt’s adventures as he tries to figure out how to eat healthy in our beloved Capital City, with the help of Mark Bittman, Michael Pollan, and everyone on the internet.
Where’s our internet smell-o-vision? I wish I could share this with you; I’m toasting homemade granola. It’s fantastically aromatic. Yum, yum, yum.
My lovely wife, Acacia, and I went to Whole Foods (on Lane Ave.) yesterday and bought a heck of a lot of bulk foods. We bought grains, we bought seeds, we bought dried fruit, we bought rice, we bought nuts, we bought beans.
As you probably know, eating healthy likely involves a lot more cooking at home than eating less healthy does. Food Matters encourages a lot of mass cooking, too. Pots of beans, pots of grains, and granola, too.
So, last night Acacia toasted some granola sans all the optional stuff and it was incredibly good. Of course, there are raisins in it, and I’ll eat just about anything with raisins. So, tonight I made a larger batch and included the optional vanilla and cinnamon. Can’t wait to give it a try.
So, while we were at Whole Foods yesterday, we also had dinner. I went to the salad bar (which has a heck of a lot more than salad, I must say) and filled up a big, black bowl. Lettuce, spinach, corn, beans, tofu (not very good) and so on. No dressing though. They also had something in the prepared foods case called soy nuggets. The dude behind the counter said they stretch the soy out like taffy so it has a consistency like chicken. Tastes damned good, too. It seemed like a gold mine at the moment, but of course after a few bites I realized there was no way it was just soy. An internet search revealed some nasty details.
Ingredients: water, textured soy protein, soy protein isolate, rice starch, spices, toasted onion, salt, sea salt, dehydrated celery, garlic powder, carrageenan, maltodextrin.
Battered/breaded/browned with: water, yellow corn flour, corn starch, sea salt, spices, expeller pressed canola oil, organic unbleached stone ground whole wheat flour, yeast, sea salt, barley malt extract.
You might be thinking right about now, what’s so horrible about that? Aside from the maltodextrin, that all seems pretty harmless, right? Well, in Food Matters, Bittman suggests you don’t buy anything from the grocery store that has more than five ingredients, and further suggests that those five be things you recognize. The more ingredients, the more 4-or-more syllable creative carbohydrates (like maltodextrin) the more likely it is you’re buying junk food. There it is, another simple, straight-forward rule designed to steer you towards food that won’t hurt you or the world. Thank the lord.
So, the verdict on the soy nuggets? They’re not from an animal, so that’s a plus, but they’re a little iffy on the ingredients. So, they won’t be an everyday thing, but they’ll make a nice addition to the menu when I’m craving some meat.