Gluten and Carbs Are Fine

Maybe it’s the capitalism in your diet that’s making you ill

Nope. Nope. Nope. Photo by Zoshua Colah on Unsplash

Gluten, carbs, saturated fat, salt, sugar, dairy – what have you tried cutting from your diet?

With rare exceptions, you can probably eat reasonable amounts of all these things and feel just fine.

The most toxic part of your diet is capitalism

If somebody is advertising a food to you, think twice before you eat it. I am trying to remember if I’ve ever seen a TV commercial for spinach or apples. Can’t remember any off the top of my head.

There’s not a huge margin in growing and selling fruits and vegetables. For each dollar you spend in the grocery store, the farmer makes about 15 cents.

If you process an agricultural product into a snack, frozen dinner or other convenience food, though? Now we’re talking about real profit!

Who gets the other 85 cents? Although you’ll see hundreds if not thousands of different brand names in the grocery store, almost all of these brands are owned by just 10 companies. They pocket more of your grocery money than any farmer or rancher does.

If you buy a loaf of bread, you know you aren’t just purchasing the wheat. You’re paying for processing, marketing, distributing and everything else, including the salary of the person at the grocery store who bags it up for you.

Did your mom teach you to cook?

Yes, I said “mom,” not “dad” for a reason, and that reason is that women are still overwhelmingly the people in charge of making menus, shopping for groceries and preparing meals. This was even more true when most of us were growing up. My dad probably cooked more than most men of his generation and at age 79 still does some of the cooking, but if your father was the main cook in your household growing up, he was an outlier. Give him an extra hug.

But also, depending on what generation you are a part of, there’s a good chance your mom’s recipes were based less on what her mom used to make and more on what food companies encouraged her to make. Whether it was when your mom, grandmother or great-grandmother was a young woman, somewhere that chain of family recipes probably broke.

What replaced it were recipes that called for processed food.

If you ever peruse vintage women’s magazines – or better yet, those ubiquitous church fundraiser cookbooks for which all the church ladies contributed a recipe – you can’t help but notice all the processed ingredients. A box of gelatin. A can of cream of mushroom soup. A tub of non-dairy whipped topping. Instant pudding. Condensed milk. Refrigerated biscuit dough.

Some recipes called for several purchased convenience foods, thanks to some home economist in a test kitchen paid to come up with a recipe that would call for as many processed convenience foods as possible. Green bean casserole is the supreme example.

I prefer to skip a couple of generations and go back to the recipes that pre-date this practice, or at least to modify the recipe. I am never going to buy a can of Cream or Whatever soup, but I will absolutely make a basic white sauce and doctor it up with ingredients like fresh mushrooms or celery.

Let’s go back about 50 years

I want to make what people cooked when a big food conglomerate wasn’t marketing anything to them.

What I like to cook is grandma food. I want to eat the foods that have been handed down for generations.

We used to eat the foods our mothers told us to eat. Now we eat the foods advertisers tell us to eat.

The food conglomerates are always changing what they say we should and should not eat. Each time the rules change, we have to purchase completely different foods. Butter is bad for you so buy margarine instead. No, wait, butter is better than trans fat, so throw out the margarine. You can eat all the fat-free SnackWell’s cookies you want. No, wait, that was exactly wrong. It isn’t fat that is bad for you, it’s the carbs. Eggs are good. I mean bad. I mean good. Never mind, they’re too expensive to eat anyway.

You know who didn’t keep changing your diet? Your grandma. She served you mostly the same things she learned to make from her own mother. She wasn’t selling anything. She was just keeping her family fed.

There’s a reason each culture has a specific cuisine

Those reasons typically have to do with what kinds of plants grew well in their ancestral lands, what kind of animals thrived there, how plentiful cooking fuel was and what kind of climate they lived in.

If you’re in a hot climate you will prefer not to heat up your house with a big oven and might favor flatbreads, but if you’re in a cold climate, you welcome the warmth created by baking loaves.

Give a pound of wheat to cooks from a dozen different cultures and you’ll get back a dozen distinctly different breads. All of them will be delicious in their own way.

I doubt any of them will include preservatives or caramel coloring.

Capitalism cashed in on feminism

Processed foods were sold to women as freedom. Your grandma’s recipes that used only whole foods took too long to make. So free yourself from tyranny and throw a frozen dinner in the oven!

It’s even “better” now, actually, because you no longer have to stir the contents of one can, one box and one jar together and heat it up. You can just tap your phone and have a complete meal brought to you hot and ready to eat. There’s even more profit in preparing and delivering meals to you than there is in selling you the components for you to combine in your kitchen yourself.

Most of us have a limited budget. How much can we afford to spend on convenience? Does everyone have a sense for just how much they’re paying?

If you make $100 per hour, what do you care if that delivery dinner costs you $50? Maybe you’d rather spend an extra hour working and earning $100 than knocking off early so you can cook a $5 dinner from scratch. Math-wise, that computes.

But how many people who make an average or modest salary have been taught to consider that their time is too valuable to spend chopping vegetables and sauteeing onions?

I happen to think preparing a delicious and healthy meal for your family (or just yourself if you live alone) is a valuable way for anyone to spend their time. You know exactly what you’re eating and you can customize the recipe to suit your tastes and dietary needs precisely. Add more or less oregano. Leave out the bacon. Substitute broccoli for spinach.

We’ve been taught to think of cooking as drudgery

Who doesn’t want to avoid mindless work if they can?

But what if we thought of cooking as a satisfyingly creative act, an important way to stay healthy and as a way to delight whomever we might be cooking for? What if we saw it as a way to bring people together and provide an enjoyable interlude for our family for an hour, or our friends for an evening?

What if we viewed cooking as a way to pass down family and cultural traditions to our children?

Is it a coincidence that obesity rates began rising at about the same time as when people stopped cooking from scratch? I don’t know. I’ve been very open about the fact that without the new weight-loss injections I could not lose weight even though I cook almost all my food from scratch, concentrating on vegetables, whole grains, legumes, fish, olive oil and nuts. It’s a complicated question and nobody has the answer. I do think it can’t possibly help that most people aren’t cooking at home and eating together regularly.

It also can’t be good that every possible kind of food is available everywhere at all times. Before we were encouraged to adopt intermittent fasting, we were encouraged to graze small bits of food all day long, and that probably did bad things to the blood sugar of susceptible people. I do not remember that being a common practice when I was a child in the 1970s.

If most of the food in your house is something that requires preparation before you can eat it, you’re not going to snack as much as you might if your pantry and freezer are full of things that are either ready to eat out of the package or after a few minutes in the microwave.

Grocery prices continue to rise

A bag of potatoes costs a lot less than a comparable quantity of frozen french fries or other frozen potato dish. The more processed a food is, the more you will pay for it. The more you’re willing to do for yourself, the more you can save.

My mother used to look down her nose at people who didn’t know how to cut up a whole chicken. I don’t think she ever bought pre-cut chicken parts in her life. I can’t imagine what she’d have thought if she could have known how many people today always purchase pre-cut fruits and vegetables because they don’t know how to cut them up themselves.

What such people would do if faced with the loss of convenience foods due to a war or major supply chain shake-up I cannot imagine. I suppose I’d offer classes to the people around me.

“This is a potato,” I’d say, holding them up. “Potatoes are magic! We can turn this into mashed potatoes or pierogies or gnocchi or french fries or baked potatoes or hash browns! And we can do it without anything in a box!”

I kid. Most of you would figure it out. It’s not rocket science. But I’d still offer help to those who need it because I know a woman my age who had to be shown how to cut up a tomato. She distrusted the safety of a home-grown vegetable because it did not resemble the pre-cut version she always purchased.

Beware of labels making health claims

“Gluten-free!” says the label of a food that no knowledgeable person would expect to contain gluten in the first place. “Fat free!” say the labels of some sugary foods. “No added sugar!” say the labels of some fatty foods. These claims are all true as far as they go, but none of them mean the food is actually healthy.

It’s all marketing talk. You hardly ever see any such labels on, say, a head of cabbage. Unprocessed foods just aren’t profitable enough to justify the marketing dollars.

So that’s where I put most of my food dollars.

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here or on Medium. My latest novel is The Trailer Park Rules. My brand-new Substack for authors interested in self-publishing is The Indie Author. Tips accepted at Ko-fi.

All wealthy families are alike; each poor family is poor in its own way.
— Leo Tolstoy, if he had written about a trailer park

For residents of the Loire Mobile Home Park, surviving means understanding which rules to follow and which to break. Each has landed in the trailer park for wildly different reasons.

Jonesy is a failed journalist with one dream left. Angel is the kind of irresponsible single mother society just shakes its head about, and her daughter Maya is the kid everybody overlooks. Jimmy and Janiece Jackson wanted to be the first in their families to achieve the American dream, but all the positive attitude in the world can’t solve their predicament. Darren is a disabled man trying to enjoy his life despite a dark past. Kaitlin is a former stripper with a sugar daddy, while Shirley is an older lady who has come down in the world and lives in denial. Nancy runs the park like a tyrant but finds out when a larger corporation takes over that she’s not different from the residents.

When the new owners jack up the lot rent, the lives of everyone in the park shift dramatically and in some cases tragically.

Welcome to the Loire Mobile Home Park! Please observe all rules.