Page 171 - How to Be a Conscious Eater - Making Food Choices That Are Good for You

ith almost every inch of food packaging cov-
ered in superlatives shouting the product’s
attributes, inspecting an item in the grocery
store can feel like being in a noisy, one-sided
conversation. This section will empower you to navigate that
noise. On the whole, the healthiest foods are, well, whole. They
don’t need marketing claims in the first place. Reducing the
amount of packaging in our foodscape—especially single-use
plastics—would also go a long way toward improving your
health and the planet’s health. But there are plenty of mini-
mally or moderately processed foods that are quite virtuous in
all three respects of the Conscious Eater Checklist.
As a general rule, the idea of “clean labels”—those with a
small number of ingredients with simple, intuitive-sounding
names—definitely has some merit. Ingredients with fewer
syllables. Ingredients your grandmother would recognize as
food. To most consumers, clean means natural. But since that
remains a murkily defined term, clean has instead come to
mean familiar. The clean-label movement has brought about a
reckoning with the question of what ingredients and steps in a
“process” are truly necessary to make a given food company’s
processed food product work. Bright colors, shelf life, consis-
tent texture and flavor—these are traits we’ve come to expect
from the products lining our shelves. They’ve been the back-
bone of that industry for decades. But packaged-food giants
have reformulated with a vengeance to stay relevant. More
progressive companies are even expanding their meanings of
clean to include ethical sourcing and sustainability standards.
With many land mines between you and the stuff that comes
from factories, this section will help you determine which pack-
aged foods are worth bringing home—or back to your desk, or to
your kid’s playdate—with clear eyes and confidence.

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