Five Questions to Help You Know
What is a whole food?
To determine whether a food is whole or not, tune in when making food choices. Before you put a bite in your mouth, before you prepare it, before you even decide to toss it in the grocery cart, take a moment to consider where the food came from. What was the process that brought the food to you for consumption? Foods in packages can be mysterious! The journey of whole foods is easier to imagine. To determine whether a food is whole or not, consider these questions:
Can I Imagine It Growing?
It is easy to picture a vegetable garden or berries on a bush. But can you imagine a field of of candy? There are no streams from which to get soda, and no trees where you can pick Oreos.
How Many Ingredients Does it Have?
A whole food has only one ingredient—itself. No list of ingredients is needed on simple foods like almonds, salmon, or quinoa.
What’s Been Done to the Food Since It’s Been Harvested?
The less, the better. Many foods we eat no longer resemble anything found in nature. Stripped, refined, bleached, injected, hydrogenated, chemically treated, irradiated, and gassed, modern foods have literally had the life taken out of them. Read the list of ingredients on the label: if you can’t pronounce something or can’t imagine it growing, don’t eat it. If it’s not something that you could possibly make in your kitchen or grow in your garden, be wary. For example, you can make miso (with some effort!) from soybeans, but you can’t make isolated soy protein.
Is This Product “Part” of a Food or the “Whole” Entity?
Juice is only a part of a fruit. Oil is only a part of the olive. Low-fat milk is only a part of the milk. When you eat a lot of partial foods, your body in its natural wisdom will crave the parts it didn’t get.
How Long Has This Food Been Known to Nourish Human Beings?
What about a criterion of a thousand years, or at least a couple of hundred? Putting something in my mouth that was only just approved, warrants caution. Time and again, the rush to put a new drug, supplement, or food additive on the market has had questionable long-term effects. Most whole foods have been on the dinner table for centuries.
• • • Adapted by Lisa Grant from Good Riddance by Andrea Nakayama
