Notice Before Judging · Oasis Builders

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Notice Before Judging

Recently we looked at the story food carries before it reaches our plate. Where did it come from? What happened between harvest and the kitchen? How much did it change along the way?

There is another part of learning about food that seems simple but can be surprisingly difficult. We can learn to notice what is actually in front of us before deciding whether it is good or bad.

Take something ordinary from the kitchen, such as a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter (does it contain arsenic), a container of yogurt, or a can of beans. Most of us already have opinions about these foods. We may think of one as healthy, another as processed, another as convenient, and another as something we should eat less often.

Those judgments can matter, but they can also cause us to skip the observation step. Instead of starting there, we can begin with questions we can actually answer. What ingredients are present? What form is the food in? What appears to have been removed, added, cooked, fermented, ground, dried, preserved, or otherwise changed? What information does the label give us? What can we recognize, and what do we still not understand?

This does not mean that every food is nutritionally equal or that processing never matters. It means that we are separating two different steps. First we observe, then we evaluate what those observations mean. This distinction becomes useful because the word "processed" by itself does not tell us enough.

Washing vegetables is processing. Grinding grain is processing. Cooking beans changes them. Fermenting milk into yogurt changes it. Freezing berries changes how they are stored without necessarily making them something we should avoid.

Other forms of processing can change a food considerably, including its ingredients, structure, nutrient composition, concentration, or how easily we consume it. The useful question is not simply, "Is this processed?" A better starting point is, "What happened to this food, and what difference did those changes make?"

This week, choose one food you regularly eat and look at it as though you had never seen it before. Read the ingredients if it has a label. Think about the form it started in and what probably happened before it reached you. Do not try to decide whether you should keep eating it yet, just notice.

What did you discover about one ordinary food when you looked at it more closely?

When you look closely at a packaged food, what do you usually notice first?

The ingredient list.

The nutrition information.

Sugar, salt, or fat.

How much processing it appears to have undergone.

Where the food came from.

Whether I recognize the ingredients.

I usually decide whether it is healthy before looking closely.

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Notice Before Judging