Tag Archives: FoodPolice

The disrespectful name I’ve given to policymakers, healthcare providers, educators, and all my well intentioned colleagues who believe in enforcement instead of kind words.

🟡Actual Veggies Burger.


Veggie burgers were born during the 1980s. The rational was simple – concentrate or extract the protein component of a plant instead of using muscle meat. Next enhance using texture modifiers, colors, flavors to form a flattened, rounded patty that resembled a ground beef paddy. These original veggie burgers were clearly ultra-processed. 

An alternative method was to use an intact food like black beans or mushrooms. Since I am partial to the intact food approach, I have always favored for black bean version. So when I found a new black bean burger “chef crafted with caramelized onion”, I decided to give Actual Veggies Black Bean Burger a try.

Like every other veggie burger in the freezer unit of an American supermarket, Actual Veggies meet the criteria for an UPF – an industrially formulated mass produced food product with considerably more than 5 ingredients.

There are good reasons to be cautious with UPF. A decade of research, most of which has been done outside the US, has established significant correlation between percentage of ultra processed food products in the dietary pattern and negative health outcomes. On the other hand, avoiding UPF means systematically avoiding convenience products and about 70% of the food currently sold in our supermarkets.

Not an easy decision especially if you’re a working mom or dad and depend on convenience to feed the family. Even tough for folks like me who prefer the taste of freshly prepared but welcome a break from the daily grind of scratch cooking. So the question then becomes, where do we draw the line between acceptable convenience and frivolous indulgence.

The best place to start thinking about making a decision is to start with an ingredient list.

The Actual Veggies burger list reads as follows: Black Bean, Carrot, Parsnip, Oat, Yellow Onion, Red Onion, Red Pepper, Chickpea Flour, Lemon, Spice Blend (Ovata Seed, Kosher Salt, Garlic Powder, Paprika, Chili Powder, Cumin, Black Pepper).

There are no added colors, no added artificial or natural flavors, and no texture modifying agents like xanthan gum or lecithin or methylcellulose. On visual inspection, I can see the black beans are intact and I can see small flecks of red pepper. The rest of those vegetables however have lost their individuality and become part of the puréed mass that holds the burger together.

I do see one “unfamiliar” ingredients I don’t keep in my kitchen cabinet – ovata seed. In fact I’d never heard of ovata seed until I read the ingredient list. Here’s what came back from a Google search. Plantago ovata is a common medicinal plant widely cultivated in tropical regions of the world. The outer seed coat of P. ovata, obtained by cleaning the seeds, contains soluble and insoluble fibre in a ratio of 7:3, making products containing P. ovata husk an ideal source of health-beneficial fibre.

Time savings are significant – I didn’t have to make my own black bean burger or bake my own brioche bun or mix up a batch of home made mayonnaise.

There’s a taste test to follow of course, but in terms of degree of processing, Actual Veggies burger gets a yellow dot. 🟡

THE VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

Always important to remember that people eat food not ingredients. That means the burger needs to be all dressed up before I take my first bite or run the numbers. Besides the Actual Veggies, I used an artisan brioche bun from a local Northeast regional baker, some olive oil for frying. I also added a couple slices of tomato, some mayo, and lettuce.

I’m happy to report that my Actual Veggies burger passed my taste test.

The calories clocked in around 400 / 450. Nutrient analysis reflects 11 grams protein (plant based protein for the sustainable crowd), 8 grams dietary fiber, and a serving of vegetables (Actual Veggies, lettuce, tomato).

The sodium does look high and there’s not enough potassium to balance the potassium:sodium ratio. The sodium comes from ultra-processed foods (my brioche bun, the mayo, the Actual Veggie). But honestly, if I had done it all from scratch, the sodium would have roughly comparable.

The CDRR for sodium is 2300mg per day independent of age, gender, or lifestyle. The Advisory Committee DGA2025 meeting #6 this year made a sobering assessment regarding sodium reduction in US dietary patterns. Sodium exceeds 2300mg even when criteria are applied to identify lower nutrient density foods. My reading of that assessment is Americans are going to have to adjust to a No Added Salt dietary pattern to comply with the CDRR. And I’m not sure setting such an austere goal is helpful. Or even attainable without enlisting the food police.

🟢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.