Food for thought

Recently I've found myself evaluating our diet and considering 1) how seriously to take concerns about health; 2) to what extent our food budget should accommodate improving the quality of the food we eat. I've gamely avoided the organics fad up til now, figuring that the dire effects of pesticides et al in the food are most likely exaggerated, very inconsequential, and certainly not worth the horrific additional expense to avoid. I've shied away from the nutty health movement, which I would (perhaps unfairly) summarise as consisting of soy milk, alfalfa sprouts, and flax seed, not for the cost reason but for the taste reason. I don't want a healthy lifestyle to be bland and boring. (There is an ongoing angst over the whole wheat flour issue, but that's a matter for another day.)

But when faced with the issue of quality over cheapness, I find myself at a real crossroads. It seems that I have been hearing from so many sources recently about the danger of high fructose corn syrup and certain fats (I really need to do a lot of research on fats and understand the difference between polyunsaturated and mono-, trans, hydrogenated, and so on) that I'm really beginning to contemplate what it would mean to cut these things out of our diet.

This website that I just discovered pointed out a very good thing about, for example, cheap peanut butter: look at the list of ingredients. You should be paying for peanuts and (possibly) salt. If your peanut butter is loaded with lard and icing sugar, you're not getting a bargain, no matter how much cheaper the junk stuff is than the natural stuff. After all, if you want to bring down the cost of the peanut butter, would you buy pure peanut butter and add lard and sugar to stretch it when you get home? Of course not. Then why pay to have the store do it for you?

Elsewhere I have read that if the list of ingredients contains words you can't pronounce, you probably shouldn't be eating it. Now that's perhaps a bit more extreme than I'm willing to get at this point (besides, who would know how to pronounce triticale without having heard it before?), but I thought it was an interesting bit of advice, anyway. Intrigued by this new thought process, I looked at the label of the bottle of lemon juice I keep on hand for drinking with hot water and honey to nurse those winter sore throats (so healthy of me, right?). The ingredients were water, lemon juice concentrate (?), and two preservatives. Now, obviously I must have bought this lemon juice because it was the cheapest bottle, and while I hate spending money, I hate getting ripped off even more. If I had wanted watered-down fake lemon juice, I could have bought Gatorade!

Furthermore, it dawned on me that I already make a budget concession for food quality when the driving factor is flavour, not health. We already consume only pure maple syrup, because we vastly prefer the taste to the fake stuff, even though it costs so many times more than Mrs. Butterworths. And we already use real butter for all everyday use and baking, because the taste and the texture is far superior to margarine. I don't even think twice about these 'splurges' in my shopping, because that's what we do and always have done and we take that for granted. I can't even imagine spreading margarine on a slice of bread. Suppose I felt this way about natural peanut butter? Suppose I had grown up preferring the unique texture and thought the packaged store-bought stuff was gross?

In theory, I'm all in favour of quality vs. quantity. I love the idea of savouring one good piece of dark European chocolate and truly appreciating a dessert over carelessly chomping down ten candy bars. I would love for my kids to grow up with a discriminating palate. But can we afford it? If I had grown up eating margarine, and now believed that butter was better for our health, would I bother to make the switch and learn to cultivate a taste for it, or just leave well enough alone? Is puzzlement.