My great grandmother wouldn’t have a clue what to do with an enchilada. She was born and raised in Maine. She ate baked beans, cornbread, meat, potatoes, salt cod, wheat flour, and molasses. The word enchilada would have been unrecognizable.
Another word that would have no meaning to her is ultra-processed. But I’ll save those comments for later …
I love to talk about why my great grandmother wouldn’t recognize an enchilada because I love to poke fun at Michael Pollan’s ridiculous food rule – Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
Thank goodness my great grandmother immigrated to California because I’ve been eating enchiladas all my life. Growing up in California, it’s hard to avoid Mexican food and I developed a taste for good street food early on. Burritos. Tamales. Chile Rellanos. And of course Enchiladas.
The enchilada pictured above is a frozen ready-to-heat meal developed by a manufacturer in California. The owners aren’t Mexican but they’ve focused on the plant based ingredients indigenous to authentic Mexican food. The frozen ready-meal is no match for a good street food vendor but in a pinch when I don’t have time to cook, a little convenience is appreciated.
THE VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW
Another one of Michael Pollan’s food rules is – Avoid food products that contain more than five ingredients. I count 20 ingredients in the ready-meal pictured above.
And 20 is a lot more than 5.
So I got to thinking about the line of demarcation between processed food and ultraprocessed food. Nutrition professionals and food scientists often disagree on which group a given food product should be placed in. The line of demarcation is especially squishy between Group 3 / Processed and Group 4 / Ultra-Processed. This frozen enchilada is a perfect example.
The ingredient list read as follows: filtered water, organic rice, organic pinto beans, organic corn tortillas (organic white corn, water, trace of lime), organic tomato purée, organic corn, organic onions, organic zucchini, organic bell peppers, organic tofu (filtered water, organic soybeans, magnesium chloride), organic pinto beans, expeller pressed high oleic safflower and/or sunflower oil, organic sweet rice flour, spices, sea salt, organic tapioca starch, olives, organic garlic, organic green chiles, chives.
• The case for UPF / Group 4. The ingredient count adds up to 20. Two of those ingredients can be classified as additives – magnesium chloride and tapioca starch. The product is also pre-prepared and ready to heat.
• The case for Processed / Group 3. The major ingredients are whole recognizable foods like corn kernels, pinto beans, the tortilla – all with the food matrix more or less intact. One of the additives, magnesium chloride, is a sea salt derivative and is used as coagulant for tofu/soybeans. The other, tapioca starch, is a commonly used thickener. Both products are marketed directly to consumers and could therefore be used in a home kitchen.
I call it the UPF kerfuffle. How should we resolve a situation where a single product qualifies for more than one NOVA group?
My solution will not satisfy food scientists and purists. But sometimes life intercedes and although it’s tempting I don’t always have a couple of discretionary hours to think about kerfuffles. So here’s my work around for products like the frozen enchilada that are made with whole intact recognizable components but are formulated with more than 5 ingredient. I put them Group 3 / Processed and think of them as G3>5.
Yes it’s subjective. Yes it’s sort of cheating. But it works. Especially useful when I’m busy and I don’t want to spend precious discretionary time knocking my head against kerfuffles.