Tag Archives: FoodCulture

Every country develops a food culture. This culture is based on variables like geographic location, seasonal availability, immigration patterns, economics, and tradition.

American food culture is the leader in convenience, innovation, marketing. Americans excel at producing and selling industrial manufactured food products. We are the global leaders in cheaper and faster.

🟡Grilled chicken, kidney beans, red bell peppers – the UPF kerfuffle.

If you’ve never heard of a UPF before, you’re not alone. That acronym stands for Ultra-Processed Food. A recent consumer survey reflected that only 1 in 3 Americans recognize either the acronym or the word so you’d actually be in the majority. Lack of awareness however does not mean you aren’t eating ultra-processed foods every day.

An estimated 50% of the calories Americans consume come from UPF. Should you be concerned? Maybe concerned is too strong a word. Aware is the word I think would be more appropriate.

Why do I want folks to be aware? Because over the last decade an impressive body of epidemiological research conducted outside the US has established a consistent correlation between UPF intake and adverse health outcomes.

Why outside of the United States? Because for well over a decade now, US food manufacturers and most of the nutrition research community have dismissed NOVA, a Brazilian food classification system that divides food into only 4 groups and has driven significant research outside our borders.

Should you stop eating all packaged food products? No. Besides even you tried to stop, you really don’t want to. Removing all ultra-processed foods from the food supply could result in mass starvation. About 70% of the food products found on the shelves of American supermarkets or sold in American fast food chains are currently classified UPF or ultra-processed.

Convenience is what drives UPF and the US has led the rest of the world in the development of convenience food technology. Even for folks like me who love to cook and are privileged with both time and means. But I’m selective about which UPF products end up in my shopping cart and which are left on the shelf. UPFs are not all created equal so I’m always on the look out for a convenience product that tastes as good as freshly prepared.

Pictured above is a home cooked meal using UPFs. The ingredient list is simple and straightforward: red bell peppers, canned kidney beans, pasta, pre-cooked chicken fajita, Jared basil tomato sauce, canned vegetable broth, onion, olive oil, salt.

Now here’s that same ingredient list arranged by NOVA food group:

G1 (minimally processed) – peppers, pasta, onion
G2 (processed culinary) – olive oil, salt
G3 (processed) – canned kidney beans
G4 (ultra-processed) – pre-cooked / pre- packaged chicken fajita, Jared tomato sauce, brick packed vegetable broth.

To make matters more complex, many products don’t fit neatly into a single group. The chicken, tomato sauce, and vegetable broth are considered by most to be NOVA Group 4 food products. They are industrially formulated and contain more than 5 ingredients. However, they are also clean labeled, manufactured with intact ingredients, and contain no added flavors, colors, or texture modifiers.

These three products have attributes from both NOVA Group 3 and NOVA Group 4. So I have grouped them together in a new subgroup which, for lack of a better word, I call NOVEL. I have no research papers to reference and or academic researcher to quote. My decision is purely anecdotal and based my own common sense.

The jarred sauce and vegetable broth are products I use on a regular basis but I probably won’t get the chicken product again. My reason has nothing to do with the product’s UPF status. The chicken puts good protein on the plate but, for me at least, it has no taste. I would get better flavor and texture by adding an extra 30 minutes prep time and sautéing the chicken pieces myself. Can’t say for sure because I haven’t run any numbers, but the final preparation would probably need less salt too. For the dish above, it was my choice of an Italian imported pasta and those gorgeous freshly prepared sautéed red peppers that made the dish work.

THE VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

NOVA was never intended to be a nutrient profiling system. As originally envisioned in 2009, it’s a classification system designed to assess the degree and purpose of food processing. But that omission does not mean nutrients are not important.

The nutrition facts label posted above analyzes my recipe as if it were a food product. As you can see, sodium is high exceeding the DV (Daily Value) by  20%. Too much salt? Perhaps. Certainly too much to permit labeling the dish “healthy”. The amount exceeds the sodium CDRR. That’s the lowest level of intake for which sufficient strength of evidence exists to support Chronic Disease Risk Reduction within a healthy population. It’s a challenging goal for food manufacturers, for restaurants, for home cooks, for consumers, and even for eaters.

🟢Seasonal tomatoes – salt to taste.


Last August, I wrote about how good a single vine ripened tomato tastes when sliced and served with olive oil and some salt. And I used the same picture of some local Hudson Valley tomatoes

The post prompted a caustic comment. A prominent member from the academic activist community who favors legal action again industrial food manufacturers questioned the amount of salt I used. So I backed off and committed to re-checking my calculation. As a result of that comment, I’ve spent the last year honing my salt metrics skills.

I had to wait until August to republish because I needed the complex flavors of a local vine ripened seasonal tomatoes to test what I’ve learned and tomatoes here in the Hudson Valley are only in season during August and September.

Good cooks salt to taste. It’s a tactile sensory skill that develops over time. A vine ripened seasonal tomato needs just enough salt to enhance the complex flavors of the tomato but never so much that those delicate flavors are overwhelmed. Nothing could be easier or simpler or more delicious.

I ran the numbers for a second time and my salt calculation was exactly the same as last year.

That activist academic didn’t believe a plate of tomatoes would need as much salt as my calculations suggested. That’s probably because academics don’t usually cook and if they do cook they don’t usually run numbers on their own recipes. But that’s a discussion for another day.

THE VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

The next question now is how much salt did I actually use? And is that amount “healthy”?

As noted above, I spent many hours over the last year improving my salt metric skills. To standardized my technique, I decided to use MALDON salt. Why Maldon? Because it’s a flake salt that is easy to distribute with my fingers. Several times over the last hear, I weighed out 10 grams of Maldon salt. Then I counted out how many 2-finger pinches I got from each 10 gram weight. Over the course of the year, a pattern emerged. The result? Each of my 2-finger pinches weighs about 250 mg and puts about 100 mg sodium on the plate.

Now let’s take a look at the label posted above. The value listed for sodium is 280 mg. In other words, for each serving of sliced tomato, I used 280 mg sodium / 700 mg salt. That’s a smidgen under three of my 2-finger pinches.

So now we move on to the more challenging question. How “healthy” Is that amount of salt? The current Daily Value for sodium is 2,300 mg and reflects Chronic Disease Risk Reduction (CDRR).

The sodium CDRR represents the lowest level of intake for which there was sufficient strength of evidence to characterize a chronic disease risk reduction. The sodium CDRR, therefore, is the intake above which intake reduction is expected to reduce chronic disease risk within an apparently healthy population.

In other words, if everyone stopped adding salt to food, fewer folks would develop high blood pressure and the population would experience fewer cardiovascular events.

We humans do need a small amount of sodium every day. It’s estimated that need would be met with about 500 mg. But maintaining metabolic function is not why we humans use salt. Like me, most of my fellow Americans use salt because we want to eat food that tastes good. There’s no getting around the cold, hard fact that there’s often a tradeoff between tasty and healthy.

My choice is tasty so I use salt when I cook. But not a lot more. That academic’s caustic comment made me angry at the time but now I’m thankful. Without the motivation, I would not have had the patience for the tedious and time consuming task of counting out 2-finger pinches and weighing out salt batches. Because of his comment, I now feel more confident in my ability to track my own use of salt when I cook.

I’ve also improved my ability to put how I use salt in context. That way the next time the food police comes after me for non-compliance, I can at least put my use of salt in context with other recipes or other packaged food products.

🟢Ratatouille – salt to taste.

The month was August. I was spending the summer in the beautiful university town of Aix-en-Provence and had some time on my hands, so I signed up for cooking lessons with the chef of a local restaurant. The dish our chef prepared that day was ratatouille. Ingredients were seasonal – freshly harvested bell peppers, eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, plus garlic, basil, parsley, and olive oil from Provence-Alpes-Cote-D’Azur, the region that produces most French olive oil.

Our chef instructor chopped up the vegetables and tossed them into a pot one handful at a time. Each batch got copious additions of olive oil and salt along with some garlic, parsley, and basil. The aroma of the vegetables as they roasted gently filled the air of that small kitchen and additions of freshly picked basil leaves and garlic sweetened and intensified those aromas. The deliciousness of my first bite has stayed with me to this day. 

How much salt did that chef use? I don’t know. He probably didn’t know. But it was the right amount. Just enough to accent the flavors of the vegetable but not so much that it dominated other flavors.

Salt to taste is not popular among my dietitian colleagues. But it’s how I use salt to this day. Now that I’m a dietitian and have become proficient with nutrition stats, however, I go back and calculate the amount of salt I use. I’ve done this over time so I know I use a moderate amount. Not low. And not high. But somewhere in between towards the lower end of the in between range.

Pictured above is the label I ran for the ratatouille I made last August. The serving size is small because I used 1/2 cup (85g), the FDA reference amount for labeling vegetables.

If I use the FDA 1994 threshold for “healthy”, it’s the Kiss of Death ☠️ for my ratatouille.

If I use the proposed FDA update for “healthy” and if my ratatouille were a product, I could use the word “healthy” 😇 on the label.

If I use the 5% / 20% FDA general guidance – 5% DV or less of a nutrient per serving is considered low / 20% DV or more per serving is considered high – the amount of salt is in between HIGH and LOW.

Unlike my chef instructor in the south of France, I do know how salt I actually used. For each pound of vegetables, I count use about 3 grams salt. That 3 grams of salt in common measure is equivalent to about 1/2 teaspoon table salt or 1 teaspoon flake salt like Diamond Chrystal or Maldon Sea Salt.

THE VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

Which group does NOVA put salt in?

Salt belongs in NOVA Group 2. That’s the group of processed culinary ingredients. Other members are ingredients like cane or beet sugar, vinegar, oil, and animal fats like lard, suet, or schmaltz. All are ingredients traditionally used by chefs and home cooks.

Most of my RDN colleagues have dismissed NOVA as unscientific, unworthy of serious attention, and based on limited evidence. I hear their objections and don’t disagree. What my colleagues miss however is the social context. 

NOVA grew out of the cultural matrix of Brazil during the later part of the 20th century. The Brazilian middle class at that time enjoyed freshly prepared meals based on a food culture inspired by mixture of indigenous inhabitants, Portuguese adventurers, and subsequent generations European immigrants. NOVA was triggered by the sudden arrival of our American food culture – industrial formulations of packaged food products which were convenient, tasty, and affordable.

NOVA makes sense to me because it reflects how I learned to cook growing up in my beautiful California and later polishing my culinary skills as a private chef for a couple of years in a suburb just outside of Paris. Using salt is normal when you’re used to cooking every day. And experienced cooks know that what’s needed is the right amount. That’s why experienced cooks salt to taste.

Fast forward to today. Most Americans no longer expect freshly prepared meals every day. And too much sodium has become a major concern. It’s no wonder my colleagues find NOVA to be unreliable. Because NOVA doesn’t use a nutrient focused lens, it provides no insight on sodium reduction.

Who does gets NOVA? It’s home cooks and traditionally minded chefs who love to cook and have been salting to taste since the day they set foot in the kitchen.

🟢Freshly prepared green beans with gremolata.


“How not to eat like an American”. That’s the subtitle for this post. My fellow Americans thrive on innovation, hyper palatability, and convenience. As for me, my interests are traditional, tasty, and I’m okay with the relentless daily grind of home cooked meals. And that takes me to the joys and pleasures of gremolata. 

It’s an herb mixture of parsley, garlic, lemon zest. There are a gazillion variations but the key to success no matter which recipe you choose is to use the freshest best quality ingredients and to adjust proportions to taste. Gremolata is a perfect finish to the early green beans I just picked up at a local farmers market. 

Ingredients for the dish pictured above are: green beans, cherry tomato, vegetable broth*, Gremolata (parsley, garlic, lemon zest), olive oil, Parmigiano, salt.

Fresh minimally processed ingredients are the key to the most flavorful freshly prepared meals. Local green beans are beginning to come in here in the Hudson Valley and those are the best green beans to used for the dish. They are sweet and tender and a joy to eat.

Commodity imports from California or Florida work well in the winter but can never match the delicate flavor of the early summer beans. Green beans will be coming in all summer, but It’s still too early for local tomatoes, so I use cherry tomatoes. To finish off, 100% California extra virgin olive oil, Italian imported Parmigiano, and gremolata.

Why you may ask spend so much money on an Italian import? Because our American Parmesan doesn’t taste the same. Like I said in the beginning, I don’t eat like an American. I spend more on food than the average American, but I economize in other areas like clothing, travel, and entertainment. So I figure that in the long it all evens out.

Besides spending more on the ingredient I like to cook with, there’s one more thing that sets me apart from my fellow Americans. I value the taste of freshly prepared and I’m okay with the NOVA food classification system, the classification system that is not based on nutrients.

I do check nutrients, but only after I’ve assembled the ingredients, prepared the meal, and verified it tastes good to me. Labels are useful because nutrients are important. But there’s is so much more to food than the Nutrition Facts Label can tell me.

I figure it’s an accomplishment however when one of my creations gets a pass. The label above is based on an FDA standard serving size. And the DV (Daily Value) is optimal as per FDA guidelines for both saturated fat and sodium. If my green beans with gremolata were a product I could label it “healthy”.

THE VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

Did you notice the star after the vegetable broth* on the ingredient list? The star stands for squishy. And squishy means the product has aspects in common with both traditional processing (NOVA Group 3) and ultra-processing (NOVA Group 4). These “squishy” products can be classified as processed or UPF (ultra-processed) depending on who is doing the classification and how the criteria is interpreted.

I use a packaged vegetable broth for convenience. Making my own is an easy task but it’s an exceeding time consuming process. The broth I use can be classified as UPF because the product lists 12 ingredients, considerable more than the 5 ingredient cut off. This vegetable broth can also be classified as processed because no added flavors or other cosmetic additions are listed. That why it’s a squishy product.

A product that lists 12 ingredients and uses vegetable concentrates would probably not be on the shelf however if the food police moved in for a massive sweep.

🟡Corn tortilla with refried beans

My California childhood was a culinary blessing in so many ways. Like local fruits and vegetables virtually all year long. Or a taste for robust whole wheat bread. Or my appreciate of good Mexican street food.

I gave up on finding good Mexican street food once I moved to the east coast a couple decades ago, but over time it’s gotten easier to source the right ingredients – refried beans, corn tortilla, and Chipolte sauce

Each of the three ingredients pictured above contribute their own unique flavors to what I’ve always loved about the Mexican street food I grew up eating in California. So you may be asking, what’s so special?

The refried beans are made with mashed pinto beans, aromatics, oil, spice, and salt. It’s more authentic to Mexican cooking to use lard but much harder to buy here in the US. Lamorana chipolte sauce is imported from Mexico 🇲🇽 and is just the right level of heat for my kind of Mexican palate.

Best of all are the corn tortillas!  They are made by Vista Hermosa – exactly the taste I remember. That’s because the tortilla is made by following the thousand year old process of Nixtamalization used by the Aztec & Mayans, a traditional processing method which is more respectful of the corn’s food matrix. I don’t buy these corn tortillas because of the certifications – USDA Certified Organic, non-GMO, and Gluten Free. I buy them because they taste like the tortillas I grew up eating. The product is not designed for convenience or shelf stability. These tortillas will go stale or develop mold if they remain in plastic for too long. So I use another kind of processing – freezing – to store any tortillas I haven’t used once the package is opened.

And as you can see by checking the Nutrition Facts Label, one tortilla actually meets the proposed FDA requirements for labeling a food product “healthy” based on the percentages Daily Value for sodium, saturated fat, and sugar. My usual portion is two or more tacos however.

THE VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

Now let’s take a look through the NOVA lens.

Most industrially formulated refried beans have relatively clean ingredient lists. Some brands add flavor and most use RBD seed oils like canola or soybean. Expeller pressed oils are refined, blanched, and deodorized (RBD) but are spared hexane extraction. The refried beans pictured above as well as the Chipolte sauce both list more than 5 ingredients.

Commodity corn tortilla brands are formulated with flavors, gums, preservatives. They are shelf stable, mold free, mass produced, wrapped in plastic, and lack a distinctive taste. The corn tortillas I use are not as shelf stable but taste like an authentic corn tortilla.

All three products could be categorized as UPF depending on which qualifiers were selected as the basis for classification. Squishy lines of demarcation make my nutrient focused colleagues go glassy eyed and provide the basis for dismissing the NOVA classification all together as unscientific.

But I have a better idea.

Modern food manufacturing technology is amazing especially in combination with microbiology. All three products pictured above use modern food processing technology to reinvent traditional methods.

So whether these 3 products are considered Group 3 / processed or Group 4 / ultra-processed, I’m okay with all three. I like to think of products like these as reinvention. Using modern food technology but following and replicating traditional methods and tastes. Sort of like reinventing the wheel.

🟡Would your Great Grandmother Eat an Enchilada?


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.