Low Crap Food Defined

There are two characteristics that define low crap food: 1. The food is as close as possible to its original form (unprocessed), and 2. The food is purchased with minimal or no packaging.

So less crap in your body usually means less crap for our earth to deal with.

Consider the waste produced when you eat a potato. If you purchase a potato, carry it home in a reusable bag, pop it in the oven and then eat it skin and all, the waste produced is nil.

Even if you peeled the potato (maybe you haven’t yet learned about the benefits of eating fiber), the resulting waste would be a small handful of biodegradable peelings that are easily composted. Your body will know what to do with the baked potato and the earth will know what to do with the peelings. A win-win situation!

Now consider purchasing potatoes in the form of chips. The ingredient list on the potato chip packaging includes potatoes, salt, sugar, flavourings and preservatives. When you consume this product, your body not only has to figure out what to do with the denatured dried potatoes, but it also has to figure out how to handle all the added salt, sugar, flavourings and preservatives.

And while your body is figuring out how to do all that, the earth gets trapped helplessly under yet another non-compostable plastic/foil package.

Are you starting to get the picture? 

The more layers of plastics, cardboard, foil, or tin a food product is packaged in, usually indicates how much processing that food has undergone. Now we all know that processed food is not good for us, but how often do we think about the link between the state of our environment and what’s in our kitchen?

So if you won’t stop eating processed food for your own health’s sake, maybe you will consider doing it for the earth.