Serving Up Healthy Food Choices
Healthy Food Choices | Foodfacts.com
Reasons To Learn Sustainable Home Cooking
We’re all cooks now. Or at least we should be.
Foodfacts.com decided to do some research on sustainable food choices for the Foodfacts.com Blog and discovered an interesting article about home cooking from sustainabletable.org. Everybody’s talking about home cooking and the connection to sustainable, local food — so, if you need a push, here are some reasons to help you get cooking with conviction. You can produce, and dramatically reduce your consumption of food contaminated by chemical fertilizers, hormones, or antibiotics. Once you’re in the kitchen, chances are you won’t choose a recipe calling for artificial color,
It’s economical. Home cooking beats all of the competition hands down when it comes to saving money. Whether you’re considering dining out or bringing home prepared food, you’re paying for someone else to do something you can do yourself — and, with a little practice, probably do better. At a restaurant, you’re spending money on the cost of running somebody’s business, including rent and payroll. By the same token, purchasing prepared food from the grocer’s freezer involves paying for the processing, packaging, and advertising of that product — none of which adds value to the food itself. When you cook, you are saving money, and when you cook sustainably, you’re taking those savings to the next level. You’re using locally raised and produced food, so you’re not footing the bill for transporting ingredients across the country or around the globe. You learn to “use the whole thing.” The bones from tonight’s chicken and the trimmings from fresh vegetables can be transformed into a rich stock, the perfect starting point for a pot of delicious and nutritious homemade soup. If you compost and do any gardening, some of your dinner waste can be repurposed as free fertilizer.
It’s safer. Think about what you don’t want to find in tonight’s dinner — sickening bacteria, toxic pesticides. When you cook, you have more control over what goes into your body. By buying organic, food is sustainably raised and minimally treated. You can avoid ingesting all of these ingredients by shopping at a market that sells real food, not a chemical supply house.
It’s healthier. Think about what you do want to find in tonight’s dinner. You have control over the nutritional value of the foods you prepare. Locally grown food is fresher by definition, which also means it’s more nutritious. Cooking methods also count. For example, roasting a vegetable will preserve vitamins that are wasted by boiling it; retaining the peel on many fruits and vegetables provides additional vitamins. Watching your salt or sugar intake? Keeping an eye on fats or carbohydrates? You’re in control of all these when you cook.
It tastes better. We’re losing our palates to an industrialized food system. Not so long ago, herbs and spices and sugar were used to enhance the flavor in our food. But in recent decades our taste buds have been corrupted through the use of cheap chemicals and corn syrup to fill that role. We’ve forgotten how wonderfully delicious fresh food tastes as we’ve become acclimated to food that’s polluted with preservatives.
The more you cook, the more you’ll learn that sustainable, local ingredients just taste better.
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