Not a whole food

It's especially difficult in this culture to eat a whole foods diet, especially since most foods are refined in some way. Take whole wheat flour for example: conventional milling opens the grain, removes the germ and takes the endosperm away to be ground. The machines then put the pieces back together again in proper quantities to create flours with the right characteristics to create yummy, risen loaves. Grinding your own wheat still involves some processing because you take the whole kernel crush it. Granted, this process isn't nearly as detrimental as making something like corn syrup, a product whose creation cannot be reproduced in your own home but grinding wheat kernels into flour still exposes the vitamin and enzymes to air, leading to oxidation and denaturation of proteins. In fact, any food processing, such as cooking, baking or cutting in some cases, can lead to loss of nutrients. However, counting the minute loss of certain B vitamins when sauteing kale as a tragedy and pursuing an extremist raw food diet is not the answer either. Eating in such a way that the food is as whole and unadulterated as possible, while still loving the process of preparing and eating is the key to a healthy happy relationship with food and a healthy happy body.

This of course brings us to the faux Silk Creamer shown at the top of the page. I must have picked it up and put it down four times before purchasing it, and you know what, it actually tastes pretty decent. It will never, ever, in any way be true cream, but it's much better in tea than the hemp milk fiasco. Nothing makes a morning like having your "milk" curdle in your tea when your groggy and grumpy already. But purchasing such a product, whose ingredients include soymilk, palm oil, maltodextrin, cane juice, soy lecithin, potassium phosphate, sodium citrate, tapioca starch, natural flavors, and carageenan goes blatantly in the face of the whole foods philosophy which I hold so dear. As with so many other areas of life, moderation in all things, including moderation. Perhaps someday I will be able to give up my tea with cream and honey, but today is not that day. Having such a small, yet vital fragment of my former life makes me happy and so, let them drink tea!