Quitting Time

How to eat healthy and beat the megafood stores at their game.

My wife and her sister both have some food allergies that are at times difficult to cook for. I have had to find substitutes for various ingredients, limit the use of others, and plain cut out some all together. Put that together with my own weight loss goals and budgetary constraints and you get some interesting cooking challenges. I can’t just buy what’s cheapest, because it’s often not healthy for one of us. As a result, re-thinking the way I purchase food has become a must.

Dissecting the supermarket has been surprising and horrifying but ultimately very rewarding journey. I’ve found that this path to affordable, healthy, non-itchy eating has taken the form of three different phases: Education, Self Control, and Reasonable Balance.

Education: Decoding the supermarket is time consuming, but once you do it’s like riding a bicycle. For instance, the codes on the little stickers that are on vegetables — those mean different things, and you can tell how they were grown based on what the code is. A 4-digit code means that it was grown in the traditional way with pesticides. A 5-digit code starting with 9 means it was grown organically. But be careful — a 5-digit code that starts with 8  means that it is a genetically modified AND grown using traditional methods… basically the worst of the worst.

Try this: Go to the salad dressing section of the store and read the ingredients list of bacon bits. The game is try to see how many bacon bit products have actual bacon in them.

Reading ingredient lists can be mind numbing. It’s hard to know what is and isn’t a good level of a particular ingredient for you — sodium, for example. A good way to save time, if you have to purchase some processed food at all, is to pick what you think is the healthiest form of a particular product and compare it to all the others.

Try this: Pick out the most lola-granola bread you can find. Sprouted grain you’ve never heard of or something like that. Now compare the nutritional and ingredient lists to see how the other bread in the aisle stacks up. You’d be surprised to see how many breads have high fructose corn syrup hidden in them.

If you can’t do math quickly in your head, bring a calculator with you — it’s the only way to figure out if you’re really saving money. The people that sell you food are banking on the fact that most consumers don’t question the underlying math behind the discounts and nutritional information. You have to break this stuff down, because it is very common for grocery chains to make you buy more than you need, pay normal price AND think that you’re being a thrifty shopper. These days coupons aren’t coupons and discounts aren’t discounts; they are strategies to get you to purchase something at the price the manufacturer wants and get you to think that you’re getting away with some spectacularly low price.

Rules of thumb: The closer a product is to the beginning or end of its life cycle, the greater the chance that you’re going to get it at a good price. Early on they want you to try it and will, for a limited time, almost give it away. This is called a loss leader. You try it, hopefully like it, and come back for more. At the end of the cycle they have to get rid of what is left, so products can be heavily discounted.

You also can get good discounts for stuff that isn’t perfect. There are special stores that usually specialize in dinged cans and stuff like that. Produce stands are usually cheaper because they buy their fruits and veggies from suppliers that specialize in food that is close to its expiration date.

Self Control: A good friend who only shops at farmer’s markets and some organic shops, would say I’m remiss by not telling you to just get the hell out of the supermarket altogether. I’m not in disagreement with that, but it is hard to shift one’s habits all at the same time. Since the majority of people will be shopping this way they might as well be armed with the best tools available for dealing with the beastie. To be honest though, eventually this road goes to alternatives to supermarket shopping anyway; it just stops at ‘practical town’ along the way.

Self control is essential in resisting the untold billions of dollars and tens of thousands of man hours that are spent trying to get you to buy something that is tastes great but is horrible for you to consume. You have to do your best to try to resist the brightly colored packaging. You should avoid things that are packaged at all if you can. I shop on the edge of the supermarket and look upon going into the middle as if I am going underwater. It ain’t easy, because ice cream is in there. If you can’t quit cold turkey then do it little by little. Buy week to week and don’t purchase in bulk.

Let the cost of an item be a barrier to you purchasing it. Read what’s in the stuff and do a little research on a particular ingredient that you want to avoid. Whatever you do, please do something to reduce the food you eat that is bad for you AND the food you waste by purchasing more than you need. My fridge is normally full on Saturday after shopping and almost empty by the end of the week. Don’t waste food: If you buy it, eat it — or give it away before it spoils.

Reasonable Balance: There are many of us who have to consider the cost of things. Many stores use “organic” as shorthand for “charge twice as much,” and we don’t have thousands and thousands of dollars to blow on high end shopping in Whole Foods.

The good news is that you don’t really have to. Most of that stuff is priced artificially high, so you should consider if it’s worth the cost to get a particular item. There are also some cruelty and other considerations to take into account as well.

Basically, you want to buy organic when the fruit or vegetable has a thin skin, because it is more likely to absorb  the pesticide sprayed on it. So buy organic peaches when possible, but oranges are a bit safer to buy non-organic.

Another way to minimize health concerns with non-organic produce is to wash the things you eat. Duh, right?

Now take it one step further. In many developing countries, people peel everything they eat because it’s assumed that the outside layer will contain bad things — cabbage or lettuce for example. The outer layers might have absorbed the pesticide, but the inner layers will be protected at least in part. You don’t have to be crazy about it, but at least you are minimizing the amount of toxins you’re likely to ingest.

Whenever possible, buy animal products that have been fed what they would eat if they weren’t in a barn: grass-fed beef, non-cooped chicken, and non-BGH-treated milk. If you follow that philosophy you will also be, generally speaking, eating food that has been treated better than their factory farmed cousins. Also, try to eat less red meat. It takes 1600 gallons of water to raise 1 lb of ground beef. Beef is also not super great for you if it makes up the majority of your diet. I’ve chosen to drastically curtail our beef intake rather than eliminating it all together.

To sum up, reduce the harm when you can, and eliminate it wherever possible. Then start to consider what is good and move towards consuming mostly those things. Do research, do math and make the decisions about what you eat. Don’t let other people make decisions about what you eat for you.