When Convenience is King
Illustration © D. Yael Bernhard
The superintendent of curriculum interrupted me as I listed the basic subjects to be covered in my nutrition program. “Please be sure to include budgeting,” she reminded me. “For many of our middle school students, health food just isn’t affordable.”
“Of course,” I said, resisting the urge to ask what she meant by “health food.” Our 12-minute meeting was nearly up, and there was no time for a nuanced discussion. I appreciated her concern, and got her point – like many people, she assumed eating healthy is only for the wealthy – or for nutrition fanatics who give up vacations and new shoes in order to pay outrageous prices.
As one such fanatic (and as a self-employed artist and writer), I can attest to the fact that I am neither financially wealthy nor bereft of shoes, nor willing to pay beyond my means. Like most people, I do pay more for my favorite treats from time to time, and might give up something else in order to do so. But I don’t often buy what is called “health food.” Instead, I shop for healthy food. There’s a difference.
“Health food” is packaged food that can only be found in a health food store or the health food section of a supermarket. What sets these products apart is their lack of certain artificial ingredients and chemical additives – the most egregious offenders of human health, and well worth excluding from your diet. You probably won’t find shrimp cocktail preserved with propylene glycol (yup, that’s antifreeze1) in a health food store, or neon-colored soft drinks. Yet there’s plenty of crap to be found on those shelves: parmesan cheese with added silicon to keep it from clumping; flavored yogurt sweetened with “evaporated cane juice” (sugar) or worse; white bread made of flour preserved with chemicals known to cause cancer; rice contaminated with arsenic; and curry sauces made with soybean oil and other nasty ingredients. Prepared foods are among the most expensive health foods, with organic nuts, cheese, meat, and certain fruits following close behind.
That’s why almost all my purchases at my local health food store are sale items. Every month features a new sale, and I stock up on whatever I know I’ll eat. This month, it’s raw feta cheese, goat kefir, canned crushed tomatoes, Italian kale, and wild-caught sardines. These foods have less than five ingredients, and no additives. I’ll buy several of these items, storing the extras in a chest freezer or sealed bins in my basement. I also notice what’s not on sale, and make a mental note to find these items elsewhere.
On my way home, I often stop at a farm stand and buy non-organic onions, yams, and avocados for half the price of the health food store, as these are not necessary to buy organic. How do I know this? A quick look at the Environmental Working Group’s “Dirty Dozen” and “Clean Fifteen” guides tell me which fruits and vegetables have the highest exposure to pesticides, and which have the least. Not everything need be organic. Kale is on this year’s Dirty Dozen list, so I’m happy organic kale was on sale. The pesticide sprayed on non-organic kale, Dacthal, is especially dangerous for women of childbearing years, as it’s known to cause birth defects. Not surprisingly, this chemical is banned in Europe.2 I think this is important to include in my program for teens, don’t you? These factors are well worth considering, as kale is an outstanding, versatile, and easy source of nutrients. You can toss those curly green leaves into just about any soup or savory dish.
The farm stand is also my preferred source of local grass-fed frozen meat and local eggs – all cheaper than at the health food store. Farm stands generally do business directly with local growers, eliminating the middle man and bringing in food that may not be certified organic, but is known to use organic practices. I prefer grass-fed to organic meat, as the latter is usually fed on corn and soy, yielding high levels of inflammatory omega-6 essential fatty acids. Factory-farmed meat, even if organic, may not be worth the price; and the animals still suffer. My personal choice is to eat meat less often or in smaller portions, in order to afford the quality I want.
I still don’t have all the items on my shopping list, so the next day I might stop at a supermarket on my way to the gym or the post office. I know from experience that this store has good prices on frozen wild blueberries; produce items such as red cabbage and clementines, organic celery, apples, and pears; and grocery items such as apple cider vinegar, tomato paste, the yellow split peas I like, and dry beans. Chickpeas are heavily sprayed with glyphosate, so they’re on my list of foods to buy organic – a short list I’ve gathered in my head over the years. You can do the same.
Two days later I complete my shopping by asking a friend to pick up nuts and frozen salmon for me at Sam’s Club, a superstore 45 minutes from my home. He goes there twice a month while heading in that direction; in return, I give him herbal extracts and infusions that I make. This arrangement makes nuts affordable for me. For my nutrition program I did a price comparison of nuts, since they’re a healthy snack that teens tend to like. Sam’s Club had the best prices.
But wait, you might object – it took five days and four different stops for me to do my food shopping. That’s right – and that’s the good news.
Until recent times, picking and choosing among different merchants was the only way to shop. Think of the boulangerie, the fromagerie, the charcuterie, the boucherie, the épicerie, and the pâtisserie – small shops or stalls still found in French towns and markets, where shoppers go to buy bread, cheese, deli items, meat, produce, and desserts. Each place is a separate stop, with interactions among various townsfolk, allowing for social connection and networking. Most provisions are sourced locally. Shopkeepers are accountable for their products, for all their customers know them.
By contrast, convenience is king here in corporate America, one of the wealthiest developed nations on earth with the biggest medical budget and the highest rates of chronic disease and cancer. One-stop shopping rules, saving gas, time, and money. Superstores bring in merchandise from all over the globe, offering lower prices for higher quantities. As a busy single mom, I know the value of convenience; I crowned myself the Queen of Multitasking, always trying to get more things done at once.
But what’s the true cost of convenience? This little monarch is heavily taxing our health. As physician Dr. Robert Mendelsohn once said, “The problem with modern medicine is that it replaces qualitative sense with quantitative nonsense.”3 The same is true of our corporate food industry, which is driven by profit, not health. In the mad pursuit of maximum efficiency, something is lost, and that’s quality. Quality interactions with small business owners. Quality produce delivered fresh from a nearby farm. Quality meat and dairy from animals raised in a natural and humane way. Bulk items that need not be packaged, such as spices, grains, and beans. Bigger isn’t better when it comes to food.
I remember growing up with TV dinners, a newfangled thing that was all the rage back then. They featured sectioned aluminum trays full of pre-cooked foods that could be heated up in a toaster oven or microwave. The cuteness of the presentation had great child appeal, and the food was made tasty with copious amounts of salt, sugar, fried textures, artificial thickeners, and assorted chemical ingredients – including MSG, an excitotoxin that makes fast foods physically addictive – all abominable for growing kids. Convenience was the only value in these products, saving a working parent from having to cook at the end of a long day. As I see it, the only real benefit of shopping in superstores is that the place is so big, you can walk a few thousand steps just going from one section to another and to and from the parking lot. Too bad the long aisles lack fresh air and sunlight.
Convenience costs more than just a loss of quality. Teenagers with eating disorders are more likely to have parents who do not cook or eat family meals together.4 As an expression of family rituals and tradition, food provides emotional as well as physical sustenance. Homemade food, like handmade clothing or handcrafted pottery, has an intrinsic value all its own. It’s a personal expression of love and caring. In her book, Women Who Run With the Wolves, Jungian author Clarissa Pinkola Estes describes the loss of an individually-crafted way of living as a “too-tame life, which leads to the loss of . . . a deep part of our instinctual nature that supports our freedom.”5 The antidote to this trap is to fashion a life of your own taste and choice. Just as limiting yourself to one source of news narrows your world view, restricting yourself to a single source of food limits your range of nutrition. It’s better to be poor but innovative, Pinkola Estes says, to create a “passionate life of your own design.”
Designing your own diet need not be elaborate. Like anything handmade, it’s a matter of searching and gathering, adding and subtracting, piecing and fitting. I make my own mixed nuts by buying walnuts, pecans, and almonds separately and combining them myself, skipping the toxic oils that are used to make convenient – and greasy – prepackaged mixed nuts. My homemade mixture lasts several months. It also saves money and reduces my consumption of plastic. And I can choose the nuts I want, excluding peanuts, which are also heavily sprayed with glyphosate and sometimes carry aflatoxins.6
This simple example demonstrates the basic idea that healthy eating costs more in terms of time and convenience than extra money. Where you choose to shop is one of the biggest factors in both the quality and cost of your diet.
Over time, I’ve learned to streamline my stops by combining them with other errands. My weekly pattern takes me in several directions, making these add-ons easy. This is why I told the students in my program that good nutrition is all about driving – that is, where you park your car. Driving equals autonomy for youngsters, and the power to steer their own lives. This self-determination may be applied to diet as well. You can be the curator of your kitchen by choosing different stores rather than settling for what’s on the shelf in one place. And you can save money and bring much better quality into your diet by making your own meals – even simple ones. Heat up a can of black beans, drain the hot beans and add a drizzle of olive oil, a squeeze of lemon, some crushed garlic, a sprinkle of parsley, some chopped tomatoes and salt . . . just one sentence is all it takes.
How much time is really saved by prepared foods? Hummus and baby carrots are just as quick to pluck off the shelf as a packaged hummus sandwich; and sliced turkey and goat cheese can be wrapped in a romaine lettuce leaf as quickly as a white flour turkey wrap with soggy tomatoes can be liberated from its plastic sheath. In both cases, the pre-packaged choice is higher in price, smaller in quantity (offering fewer servings), and lower in quality – with little real savings in time. Start making casual observations, and you might be surprised by what you find.
Once in a while, I shop for food online. Here, too, shopping around may take extra time but yields healthier, more affordable choices. A refill of my favorite “Real Salt” directly from its maker costs much less than buying another shaker at a health food store. Again, one-click shopping may be more convenient, but isn’t it worth a few minutes – or an extra shipping fee – to get a better product? Where do you draw the line in prioritizing your health? There’s no right answer to that question, but consider this: the dandelion root tea I recently bought on Amazon was imported from Hungary, fumigated with who knows what in crossing international borders, and arrived in my mailbox in a stale-smelling pouch full of dusty teabags. I expected bulk “cut & sifted” (c/s) root from the same continent where I live. Next time I’ll order from a dedicated herb supplier, who is far less likely to be the target of fraudulent suppliers – and whose “contact us” button will get me a human being who can tell me where the root comes from. Better yet, I’ll dig my own dandelion roots in the fall, once they’ve stored up maximum plant sugars, and wash and dehydrate them by hand. The only cost is time. The benefits bring great satisfaction.
Maybe it’s time to dethrone that petty tyrant who tells us there’s nothing more to life than the pursuit of minimum cost and maximum convenience. I prefer to pursue something else: good health and happiness. I find it as hard as anyone else to resist the quest for efficiency. But for me, nutrition trumps convenience – and looking downstream, I believe it will lead to better health. It’s never too late to improve your nutrition – or too early, I tell my young students, their faces full of potential, their youthful resilience so tender and vulnerable. I want them to know good, safe food is affordable and within their reach. They’re behind the wheel of their own future health. The power that propels them is knowledge. I hope I gave their brains some good food for thought – and yours too, no matter what your age.
To your good health –
Yael Bernhard
Certified Integrative Health & Nutrition Coach
Yael Bernhard is a writer, illustrator, book designer and fine art painter with a lifelong passion for nutrition and herbal medicine. She was certified by Duke University as an Integrative Health Coach in 2021 and by Cornell University in Nutrition & Healthy Living in 2022. For information about private health coaching or nutrition programs for schools, please respond directly to this newsletter, or email dyaelbernhard@protonmail.com. Her art newsletter, “Image of the Week,” may be found here. Visit her online gallery of illustration, fine art, and children’s books here.
Information in this newsletter is provided for educational – and inspirational – purposes only.
https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/ToxProfiles/tp189-c1.pdf
https://www.ewg.org/foodnews/kale.php
The quote is committed to memory, but I cannot locate it. Similar quotes by Dr. Mendelsohn may be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/325752.Robert_S_Mendelsohn
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2856109/
Pinkola Estes, Clarissa, PhD; Women Who Run With the Wolves, Ballantine Books, 1992, pg 220.
https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/substances/aflatoxins