THE PLEASURES OF PROCESSED FOOD
I know I shouldn’t eat processed food. I know that I am shortening my life by eating processed food with every malady under the sun being at greater risk. I might not make it to 90 (a year and a half away) and my chances of making it to 100 are way down. But I can’t help myself.
The problem is that processed food tastes better, is easier to prepare, comes in meal sized portions and has way more variety.
My grocery store of choice for processed food is Trader Joe’s with Aldi coming in second. Aldi is cheaper but Trader Joe’s has more variety. While Aldi, a German chain world wide, has a good German selection, Trader Joe’s has food from around the world. Their frozen Indian dinners, made in Canada, and their Sri Lankan mango chutney are authentically Indian. Yesterday I had Korean barbecued ribs that were very tasty, their Chinese noodles are delicious, their Thai Tom Yum snacks (hair raising if you don’t extract the red chili) is the best snack there is, even according to the New York Times which pointed it out to me.
In addition to the variety and the cost is the flavor that is delicious. If you read between the lines, healthy food, the kind I should be eating has no salt, no spices, no flavor. Healthy food is bland, bland, bland. What you have to avoid to be healthy is additives, additives that are there to hook you because they taste so good. Advice on healthy food warns you not to get hooked on addictives/flavor, the things food processors put in to make you keep coming back.
If you want to eat healthy food you have to cook it yourself and add no flavoring of any kind. In addition if you cook it yourself you have to buy the vegetables, chop them yourself, cook them for half an hour and because this requires so much time and work (in adddition to cleaning the many pots and pans that get dirtied in the process and have to be cleaned) you will be tempted to make a huge pot of the stuff and either eat it every day for a week or freeze it (trying to escape freezer burn) and have to face it every time you open the freezer. With frozen processed food there are no dirty pans, no cooking, and portion sizes are one or two meal size.
That, in short, is why I love processed food, which I hope won’t kill me.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 