“If you are what you eat, then you might as well eat something good.” – Ratatouille
Who doesn’t love food? For many of us, eating good food is all we need to make us happy. A healthy dose of deliciousness when we are down in the dumps is just what the doctor’s ordered.
However, not only that it can satisfy, food is also an essential part of life. And like every other part of life, its nature is transient. Food is constantly changing, and by that definition, so is what constitutes as good food.
The first thing that comes to mind when talking about good food is nearly always taste. Good food means delicious food. And yet, good food is not only delicious food. This is especially evident at this time and age, when many concerns have been raised over what kind of food is actually ‘good’.
As Jim Rohn, a famed American entrepreneur and author, said: “Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.”
Food has been and will always be the first and foremost way for us to nourish our body. While taste will never cease to matter, there has been a rising awareness in a healthier choice of diet, especially in the past decade or so.
The proofs are many. Discussions on healthy food are all but common. More and more people are also googling about this topic on the Internet. Words like cholesterol and saturated fat have become a regular part of daily life. Research breakthroughs related to health are also avidly spread through social media, to the frustration of many affected manufacturers. One of the latest, which says that sugar, and not fat, is the main cause of many degenerative diseases, has caused a decline in sugar consumption. Nowadays, it is far from unusual to hear someone make an order of drink or food with less sugar in it, or even go without.
Eating healthy is not limited to reducing sugar intake. Organic foods are now all the rage. In supermarkets, there is a growing trend to choose vegetables bearing the ‘organic’ label, even if they are more expensive. Some who strive to be even healthier will restrict their food intakes to boiled or steamed dishes with little to no fat or oil content. And then there are those even more extreme, who will go all out and take the uncooked, unprocessed way with choices of raw fruits and vegetables, as well as seeds and grains.
But what if you love fried food a bit too much to remove it entirely from your diet? Worry not, plenty of researches have also been done on that front. The result is only too evident. A baffling number of varieties of cooking oil are now available on any supermarket shelf, from coconut oil to sunflower oil and grapeseed oil and still many more.
The restaurant business is certainly not staying still either. Nowadays, many places promote healthy food with zeal, claiming to use fresh, organic ingredients or trumpeting the lack of MSG or chemical additives in their cooking. Some even attach a calorie count on every item in the menu to attract more health-conscious customers. All around us, there is a proliferation of shops selling low-calories food, such as bakeries which sell multi-grain bread and use less butter and fat, resulting in fewer calories in each bite.
But, then the true foodists would ask, what about the taste?
Contrary to popular belief, healthy food does not equal tasteless food. That they possess a less strong flavor, however, is true in many cases. Then again, researches have shown that too much salt and sugar is actually harmful to our health. To accustom ourselves to using less of them is perhaps not a bad idea.
To borrow an architectural philosophy, sometimes less is more—and it is certainly true in this case.
