🟢 Escarole – What does #RealFood look like?

Escarole is popular in the Mediterranean especially in France 🇫🇷 , Spain 🇪🇸, and Italy 🇮🇹 . This versatile leafy green vegetable has a crisp crunchy texture, a distinctive taste, and a slightly bitter flavor.

Escarole also makes a great visual for what I refer to as real food. The head pictured above is from a Long Island farmer’s market and, as you can see in the bottom right photo, that outer leaf still has soil particles clinging to the outer leaves. That’s real dirt on the leaf – a gritty reminder that the escarole was recently harvested.

Health experts have been telling Americans for a long time to eat more vegetables. The USDA released MyPlate as part of the Dietary Guidelines  in 2010. The graphic contains specifics on how to classify, count, and measure food groups. Escarole is part of the Vegetabls Group and further classified as a dark leafy green vegetable along with arugula, basil, cilantro, dark green leafy lettuce, endive, mixed greens, mesclun, and romaine lettuce. MyPlate however doesn’t tell me much about what makes food real to me.

So what does makes food real for me? I dig deeper into where a food is harvested, how it’s handled, to what extent it’s sustainable, whether or not it’s local and seasonal to my location, and to what extent a food has been processed before it hits my shopping cart or the bag I take to the farmers market. The closer I can get to the agriculture origins of the food I eat, the more “real” the food becomes to me.

VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

Many of my fellow Americans can’t be bothered with what I call real food. Consider that escarole! It’s dirty and messy and heavy. Like all leafy green vegetables, escarole is  mostly just big bag of nutrient rich water.

Real food always takes work. Sourcing, lugging, storing, planning, prepping, cooking – every step in the process is labor intensive. And to add insult to injury, real food usually costs more.

The food industry has provided a viable alternative – convenience. Given the amount of work required to eat real food every day, it’s no surprise that the women’s liberation movement and the rise of convenience products coincided.

Fast forward to today. The taste of freshly prepared #RealFood comes at a cost. And that’s a cost most of my fellow Americans aren’t willing to pay.

🔴Aranciata • Hydrating and Refreshing.

Pictured above are two versions of my favorite imported Italian 🇮🇹 soda along with the respective sales pitch and ingredient list. Aranciata is a drink that I enjoy on a hot summer day – poured into a glass and served with lots of ice. Tastes so good!

I do like the taste of sugar. Our guidelines, food labeling regulations, and basic common sense tell us that too much sugar is not good for our health. That’s good advice. All things in moderation. Even sugar.

How to describe the taste of Zero Sugar? I find that’s a tough question to answer. It’s almost too sweet but still a little off … Maybe a little flat. But products marketing Zero Sugar are not targeted to folks like me because I’m okay with sugar. Zero Sugar is selling something more than sweet taste and targets consumers looking for something else besides a hydrating refreshing drink on a hot summer day.

The marketing of indulgences has been lucrative since the beginning of human existence. Folks love getting something for free. We all want our indulgences. But many of us aren’t nearly so keen on paying the consequences of indulgence. We don’t want to feel guilty. And we don’t want to acknowledged we’ve been indulgent. This human phenomena has not escaped the eye of the global food industry. They have mastered the art of selling indulgence or, as it is called in advertising circles, craveability and guilt free.

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If you’ve read the two lists of ingredients, you already know that both products are ultra-processed. Of the two sodas pictured above, however, one is less highly processed than the other. If I were a NOVA loyalist, I wouldn’t buy either one. As much as I love NOVA, however, I’m not a loyalist. Refreshing and hydration does beat ideology on one of those hot humid Hudson Valley days.

The Aranciata does use cosmetic additives – orange extract and natural flavor. Let’s call these cosmetic additives the Food 2.0 first generation. The ingredient list in Zero Sugar however includes two artificial sweeteners which are manufactured using more invasive forms of ultra-processing so I think of them as Food 2.0 second generation.

Sucrolose is an altered chemical structure designed by replacing 3 hydroxyl groups on the sucrose molecule with three chlorine atoms. This rearrangement means to body does not recognize the structure as food and therefore it is not broken down during digestion.

Acesulfame Potassium is a high intensity sweetener synthesized by chemists and patent protected since the 1970s.

🔴 Biscuits & Cookies – What’s a sugar metric?

Here’s the challenge. Imagine you’re standing in the supermarket isle in the cookie section – competing cookie brands as far as the eye can see. Your goal is to determine which box has a low concentration of sugar without opening all the packages and tasting each cookie.

Should be easy right? But when you check the Nutrition Facts, all you find out is the number of grams of added sugar in a serving …

The label is very helpful for determining how many grams of sugar a cookie puts in your gut. That’s useful information but it’s not what I know.

I want to compare the concentration of sugar in the McVitie versus the Biscoff. I want to know the relative degree of sweetness in the two cookies. That’s a calculation I know how to do using the data on the Facts label but it’s awkward to stand in the cookie isle and try to run numbers so I took the east way out and purchased both brands.

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Recipe analysts and food labelers have a name for I want to know.  It’s called proximate analysis and it’s the metric that reflects nutrient composition. Proximate analysis data sets are compiled per 100 grams and are based on four nutrients:  moisture (water), protein, carbohydrate, fat.

After I got home I ran the respective numbers. The McVitie’s is 14% added sugar by weight and the Biscoff by is 35%.

Both products are ultra-processed. Both use various combinations of cosmetic additives which modify texture, taste, or color. Neither one qualifies as healthy. The sugar squad will bang on my head no matter which one I like. Why? Because moderation is not an option for the digital mindset. My response to the sugar square is this. I don’t need a label to tell me a cookie isn’t healthy.

The ultimate test of course is how do the two cookies taste?  The McVitie’s has the texture of a shortbread. And as reflected by in sugar metric calculation, it’s sweet but just enough sweet to balance the mouth feel of fat and the blandness of wheat flour. The Biscoff is intensely and to my taste at least obnoxiously sweet. So sweet in fact, I trashed the package after my taste test.

Just for comparison purposes, Americans favorite cookie is the Oreo. And the sugar metric for an original Oreo is 38%.

🟢Salade Composée. Scratch cooking is the opposite of convenience.

Cooking from scratch takes time, dollars, commitment. And knowing how to relate to food independent of nutrients helps a lot.

This picture dates from 2015. But it reflects what I learned about good food growing up in California and cooking in France. Good food starts with good ingredients. And what makes an ingredient good has precious little to do with nutrient composition. Or convenience.

Since I decided to do another saladé composeé for a colleague who is coming for lunch this week, I’ll use the picture as an example of what good food means to me. Good ingredients mean careful sourcing. But that’s what it takes so each ingredient contributes its own unique taste and texture. And there’s nothing fast, easy, convenient, or efficient about souring good ingredients.

Here’s what I need to get started: farro, beans, vinaigrette (oil, vinegar, mustard), tuna, egg, cucumber, tomatoes, cabbage, parsley, salt.

I looked in my kitchen and found pastured eggs, red cabbage, California extra-virgin olive oil, sherry vinegar, Dijon mustard, cooked cicerchia beans (an Italian heirloom bean), jared hand packed tuna, and some emmer spelt (farro) in my freezer.

Never heard of farro? Trust me, you’re not alone. It’s the Italian word for what we Americans call an ancient grain / emmer spelt.  Italian farro is sold refined (pearled) or whole grain (un-pearled). I love the chewy texture and complex taste of whole grain farro so I’ve searched out American grain farmers who grow farro and sell over the internet. I recently bought a 5 pound bag, so I pulled that bag out of the freezer, removed a cup or so, and started cooked the farro. It takes several hours to soften the wheat kernels enough to develop that chewy texture.

My regional market supplied the ingredients. It’s May here in the Hudson Valley and locally grown won’t start to come in until July. So I need to fall back on commodity / hothouse crops and California imports.

VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

Our American paradigm for a healthy pattern is nutrient focused and commodity based. In that order. Since the 1990s, the Nutrition Facts Label has reinforced the nutrient supremacy message. And commodity crops are the basis for our Dietary Guidelines food groups. The result is that many Americans and most health professionals have forgotten about what I call good food.

The food police are going to bang on my head for my generous hand with the olive oil. The amount I used exceeds 20% which means I used smidgen more olive oil than the food police likes to see. More important however, if I had put the salad together with commodity products – tuna in a pouch, a cheaper seed oil, a random off the shelf can of chickpeas – well the taste just wouldn’t have been the same. Sourcing and preparation would have been faster and probably cheaper but convenience would have come at the cost of good taste.

🔴Carrot Cake – Mothers Day 2025

This Whole Foods Carrot Cake was our dessert last Sunday. Excellent dinner – halibut, rice pilaf, broccoli florets. My son-in-law grilled the brocolli florets and they came to the table ever so lightly charred. He pan fried the halibut and served it with a herb infused butter / olive oil sauce. He did cheat a little and used a package for the rice pilaf.

A moderate well balanced meal followed by a significant indulgence. But that’s what happens on Mother’s Day. The day was memorable for both food and company – perfect, beautiful, delicious, enjoyable. Everything a good Mother’s Day should be.

I’ll share with you upfront, the cake was tasty. Whole Foods does have problems and I rarely shop there these days, but when it comes to cheese or pastry, they do a credible job. The cake was not too sweet. It didn’t upset my stomach. And my gut did not complain. Since dinner was both good very satisfying, we all had moderate pieces. I didn’t give the cake a second thought as to its status until I found the box when I was cleaning up. A list of ingredients and a nutrition facts label. Okay I said to my self. Let’s take a look.

And that’s when I focused on the list of ingredients. OMG! After deciding the list was too long to count, I highlighted in yellow all the possible candidates that could serve as markers of ultra-processed. The two processes that stand out to me are natural flavors and multiple flavor extractions – cosmetic additives with the flavor notes suggesting Food 2.0.  The cake gets a red dot.

How would the taste compare with freshly baked? My guess is made from scratch and freshly baked would taste cleaner, sharper, and probably better. No less indulgent however. But I’ve never made a carrot cake so I can’t reference my own experience.

The Food Police insists that #UPF is not a reliable indicator of whether or not a food is healthy. On that point, I’m sure all can agree. Plenty of taste and not much else. So it really doesn’t matter whether you are nutrient focused or processing focused. Carrot cake is not a healthy choice!

Now I’ll just say Happy belated Mother’s Day to all the moms and grand moms out there. Here’s hoping your Mother’s Day was as perfect as mine was.

🟢Seafood Stew • The Joys of Freshly Prepared.

Americans love convenience. A quick snack to grab and go. A pouch to throw in the microwave that is ready to eat in five minutes. Our American food culture is based on convenience. Perhaps that why so many Americans have so little interest in cooking.

There’s plenty of joy in the taste of freshly prepared but there’s nothing convenient about cooking from scratch.

What does it take to cook? It takes time. And skill. And financial means. And commitment. And patience. Cooking is the opposite of convenience. The US leads the globe in the development and marketing of ultra-processed. And I don’t see our passion for #UPF fading any time soon.

Consider the time and labor required to put that seafood stew together! For starters, I needed to assemble 15 ingredients which included a good brand of imported Italian pelati (peeled tomatoes), some cod and shrimp, jarred roasted peppers, olive oil, an honest baguette, and the usual aromatics – onion, fennel, parsley, garlic. And I decided to use heritage white beans so they needed to be prepared before I could start. All that before I could walk into the kitchen and begin the job of washing, chopping, cooking, and cleaning up.

The nutrition label is my best approximation of a serving based on the recipe that inspired me. Roughly speaking, the proportions serve 4 to 6 people and the Facts Label reflect nutrients for 4 servings.

Salted to taste with just the right amount to highlight the other flavors but never so much that salt overpowers. There’s a special forces unit of the food police that monitors compliance with Dietary Guidelines and they will bang on my head for using too much salt. Aside from that, however, there’s not much else for the unit to complain about. Good fiber. Good protein. And lots of potassium.

Why would anyone work as hard as I did to put that beautiful mixture of fish and aromatics and tomato and beans on the plate? Because the joys of freshly prepared are no more and no less than the pleasure we humans derive from fueling our bodies with food that tastes really really good.

🔴Classic Cream Wafers • Tastes good to me.


What tastes good to me is not necessarily what most of my fellow Americans like. And I usually avoid #UPF because I prefer the taste of freshly prepared. But I’m okay with  the taste of these crispy wafers with chocolate cream filling. How to explain that anomaly will require some investigation.

The product is clearly and unequivocally ultra-processed. How do I know? Because I counted the number of ingredients and looked for markers. The list reads as follows:  wheat flour, coconut oil, glucose syrup, whey powder (milk), sugar, cocoa processed with alkali, soy flour, chocolate (sugar, chocolate liquor), nonfat dry milk, hazelnuts, leavening (sodium hydrogen carbonate, disodium diphosphate), salt, soy lecithin, barley malt extract, peanut butter, spices, almonds, natural vanilla pods. Yikes!

So why does it taste okay to me? To answer that question I had to take a look at nutrients.

The saturated fat value is more than 20% DV (Daily Value) and is therefore considered high. Saturated fat comes from these two ingredients – the cocoa and the coconut oil. As long as it’s doesn’t upset my stomach, I’m okay with high fat.

As for added sugar, the value is 10% DV and is considered moderate. Personally I don’t find the DV for added sugar useful. My preferred reference point is percent composition by weight. The label tells me there are  5 grams in one serving and a serving weights 32 grams. With those two numbers I can calculate the percent composition by weight. The sugar metric for this product is 16 grams per 100 grams. That means the product is 16% added sugar by weight. Oreo thins, a classic American favorite, has a sugar metric of 41%. In other words, the wafers that taste good to me have a lot less added sugar than an Oreo Thin.

Anomaly solved. I like these wafers in spite of their #UPF status because they don’t upset my gut and they’re not too sweet.

Finally for those of you who relate better to food apps than to words, check out the GoCoCo score. The score for this product is 1/10.

🟡 Mexican Black Beans • Convenience & Salt

Chefs love salt and so do home cooks like me. Never too much salt. But always Just enough so the meals and main dishes we put on the table taste good.

I like convenience and these Mexican Black Beans work for me. You’ll find a couple of pouches in my pantry so when I need to I can put a meal together quickly. Like the shrimp tacos I make using frozen shrimp. Or a meal of rice and black beans and some leftover chicken. 

The ingredient list reads like what I use for scratch cooking. The degree of processing is just different. Powdered onion and garlic instead of intact aromatics. Seed oil instead of olive oil. Since the product is industrially formulated with 5 or more ingredients, technically it would be classified as ultra-processed. But clean labeled convenience products made with intact ingredients are always acceptable in my kitchen.

I grew up eating Mexican street food and have always liked the taste of beans. Dietitians and food labelers get all hung up in the discussion of VEGGIES vs PROTEIN food groups. Why do they get so hung up? Because one food can’t be present in two groups. As for me, I don’t have that problem. I say beans or pulses can fit in both groups. Then I sit down and enjoy my dinner.

These Mexican black beans have a moderate amount of salt. How do you know if the amount is moderate? Check the label. A low amount of sodium would be 10% DV. A high amount would be 20%. These Mexican bean are right in the middle at 14%. And that’s just the right amount to taste good to me.

The food police folks will argue the product has too much salt. And that’s technically accurate.  To market a food product as “healthy”, the DV should be <10%. As I’ve learned however in my exploration of the disconnect between what the experts tell us to eat & the real food I actually, most of the convenience products that can be labeled “healthy” don’t taste good to me.

Finally for those of you who relate better to numbers than to words, my favorite food app  GoCoCo scores the product 10/10.

🔴 Twinkies – Don’t sweat the small stuff!

I bought a package of Twinkies and snapped this picture prior to the JM Smuckers acquisition in 2023. But comparing the ingredients list back then with what I read on the manufacturer’s website today, the ingredients list is basically the same with a few minor changes.

The brand has had its ups and downs since it was founded in 1930. But the brand is alive and well today. And thriving. That means lots of somebodies out there are buying, eating, and enjoying these iconic snack cakes.

I often refer to the Twinkie as the poster child for UPF.

The ingredients are all refined, compounded, or fragmented. The list includes sugar, enriched wheat flour, oils, salt, baking soda, and multiple cosmetic additives like high fructose corn syrup, dextrose, modified food starch,  soy lecithin, cellulose gum, xanthan gum, artificial & natural flavors, yellow 5, red 40.

There’s no real food in an Twinkie. Even if the FDA allows food labelers to count the refined enriched bleached wheat flour as a grain, it’s not my idea of what a real food should be.

The marketing copy sells indulgence – taming your sweet tooth with creamy, flakey, cakey “goodness”. So where does the “goodness” come from? That is an easy question to answer. The product has way too much sugar, fat, even salt. Sales 101 is and always has been – sell what you have. And all the Twinkie has to offer is sugar plus fat “goodness”.

I used the same picture I took in 2023 because I didn’t want to buy a second box. I ate a couple of Twinkies after snapping the pic and my gut got confused. And a little upset. My gut just isn’t used to dealing with the kind of indulgence Twinkies is selling. Was it the cocktail of cosmetic additive? The fragments or compounds? Or perhaps the preservatives required to keep the Twinkies soft and safe to eat after spending months on the shelf? Or was it the intense sweetness? We just don’t know yet …

VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

My fellow Americans are becoming increasingly concerned about #UPF. Guaranteed, we’ll all be learning a lot more about ultra-processed over the next couple of years. But good evidence takes time and money. And waiting for good evidence can take a years.

When 70% of the choices on the supermarket shelf are considered UPF, we could starve to death if we wait to make a decision until all the evidence comes in.

So that’s why I’ve put together my own strategy to help navigate the supermarket.

RULE – There’s no consensus yet on what is and is not #UPF but if something you eat upsets your gut, pay attention. And stop 🛑 eating it.

RULE – Don’t sweat the small stuff. There are big offenders like Twinkies and little offenders like industrially formulated whole grain bread. So for now focus on the big offenders.

🟢 On Passover & Pine Needles.

This Passover menu came together in 2001. My challenge was to make a Sephardic version based on recipes from the Mediterranean – southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. The usual version here in the northeast reflects the cultural traditions of Northern Europe.

Researching and planning the menu took weeks. Ingredient sourcing required an additional week and then I needed a day or two for washing, chopping, and other prep tasks to get the grunt work out of the way before I actually started to assemble and cook.

Scratch cooking is time consuming and tedious because most of the ingredients are minimally processed. I used lots of olive oil, seasoned with salt, and sweetened with sugar & honey. I also used a few processed ingredients. Cocoa powder for the cake. The California Cabernet Sauvignon. And of course the matzoh. But no ultra-processed ingredients.

As happens with many celebration meals, we all probably ate a little more than we needed but aside from that, the meal was pretty healthy. Three salad appetizers put lots of vegetables on each plate. The haroset is fruit based and I served fresh pineapple with the cake. There was meat for the omnivores and nuts for the plant based folks. Almond meal in the flourless chocolate cake, walnuts in the Spanish salad, and chopped almonds in the haroset.

A spectacular meal! And a taste sensation that generated accolades and praise from my Jewish friends. Delicious. Enjoyable. Worth all the hard work it too to put it on the table.

VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

You are probably asking now when I’m going to get to pine needles …

The food police love counting nutrients. And counting nutrients is just like counting pine needles. Intensely focusing on pine needles means more that just missing the trees. It means missing the whole forest. The social act of celebrating with friends. The pleasure and enjoyment of really good freshly prepared food. And the traditions and culture that form our tastes and preferences.

Back to counting pine needles. I didn’t use whole wheat matzoh. I roasted a whole chicken intact then ate, enjoyed, and savored the crispy fatty skin. I used honey in one of the salads and added sugar to the cake.

It’s true the matzoh was not whole wheat, but the meal as a whole had plenty of fiber. It’s also true that chicken skin is mostly fat but the meal as a whole had a favorable fatty acid ratio. And I am definitely guilty of using more grams of added sugar than is currently recommended.

But I know something the food police can’t see. I know that food is more than the sum of its nutrient parts. There’s an unintended consequence of focusing solely on nutrients. The food police are so busy counting pine needles they have lost sight of the meal.