| What’s in Your Shopping Cart? | ||||
| By Ng Hooi Lin Translated by Tang Yau-yang | ||||
Have you ever considered the ratio of natural and processed foods in your shopping cart? When it comes to what your family eats, you have a choice. My six-year-old daughter, Ruijia (睿佳), is optimistic and cheerful by nature. She always wears a smile, and she is always very outgoing. Perhaps because of her geniality, people she meets often give her candy or cookies. One day when we were eating at our favorite vegetarian restaurant, the owner gave Ruijia a gift: a tempting, brightly colored cupcake topped with an icing Christmas tree. When we got home, my daughter opened the box and looked closely at the cupcake inside. “Is that Christmas tree really good to eat?” she asked. In the end, she ate the cake, but not the icing, which ended up in the sink. The next morning, with her eyes still bleary from sleep, she examined the icing that was still in the sink. It was as tantalizingly green as when she had left it there. That very afternoon my niece gave us some gingerbread cookies, my absolute favorite. Those cookies, like the cupcake, were decorated with colored frosting in the shape of Christmas trees. “Mommy, are you sure you want to eat the frosting?” Ruijia said to me. I turned to face her as she continued talking. “I noticed that the green icing on the cupcake I got at the restaurant yesterday was still bright green even after sitting in the sink all night. There must have been some artificial coloring agents. It wouldn’t be healthy to eat.” “I’ll scrape the icing off my gingerbread cookies,” I said to her, knowing what she was thinking. “What I like are the cookies themselves.” As she watched me remove the icing with a spoon, she piped up again: “Mommy, if the icing on the cookies and the cupcake all ended up getting scraped away because it’s not healthy, why do people add it to the pastry to begin with? Isn’t that kind of wasteful?” Frankly, I was quite surprised that a little child would ponder such an issue and that she, calling on her limited knowledge, could judge whether a food is harmful to her health before deciding to eat it or not. I wondered how many grownups pay as much attention to what they put into their mouths as my daughter does.
Knowledge vs. action I told a friend, a fellow dietitian, about this small incident. She responded that children are often much more receptive to what they are told than adults, who often have a hard time changing their deep-seated opinions. Besides, many grownups may say that they agree with a good idea, but then they often never end up acting on the idea. Even among professional dietitians, there is no lack of people who do not hesitate to ingest stuff like colorful cakes, diet cola, or sausages. Indeed, although people working in the field of nutrition are generally considered more knowledgeable about nutritional facts, they, like everyone else, are not immune to the disconnect phenomenon: Knowing that a food is not healthy does not guarantee that they will not eat it. I usually go grocery shopping on weekends. At checkout counters, my occupational habit invariably takes over and I inspect the contents of other carts. Here is what I have found: Many carts contain more processed food than natural foods. Such processed food included processed meats, cookies, instant noodles, sodas and other sugary drinks, instant drink powder laden with non-dairy creamers, and frozen foods. In my own shopping cart, on the other hand, processed foods are usually—by a ratio of three to seven—outnumbered by natural foods, such as grains, vegetables, fruit, beans, and nuts. The processed foods that I often buy include such items as tofu products, soymilk, and rice noodles. I know that it would be futile to try to keep processed food completely out of our diet, but as every health-conscious consumer knows, a vital key to better health is a varied diet consisting mostly of fresh, natural food. If you tend to eat more processed food than natural food, maybe it’s time to rethink your choices. If a child, like my daughter, thinks about what she eats, shouldn’t we adults be more aware of our food choices?
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