Health food vs. healthy food + more

An essay on health food vs. healthy food, pride in produce, to juice an orange, rumors & ramblings, and your music pairing

There is a difference between health food and healthy food. Health foods, to me, are eaten to feel better physically, yes, but more so to feel better about yourself. And nowadays, healthy foods can be almost anything. Many so-called healthy foods have become empty workaround hacks: a dairy-free chipotle mayo dip for my gluten-free tater tots, boxed mac and cheese that’s healthy because it’s made of garbanzo beans.

As the health food market grows, so do our body mass indexes. Have we innovated and improved the flavor of healthy food to the point where it tastes too good? Or have we repackaged and sold good-tasting food as “healthy”? 

Healthy food used to taste a little bit bad, just on its own. Think medicinal alfalfa sprouts or birdseed-forward ancient grains. I come from a time when sweet potato fries were not yet paired with a green goddess ranch. A time when we accepted brown rice’s cardboard flavor profile for what it was. That unpleasant but tolerable flavor told our brains that we were eating virtuously and that we should be proud of ourselves for not buying Chili Cheese Fritos instead.

Thanks to humankind’s will to eat yummy food, we’ve evolved and innovated brown rice, manipulating it into a guilt-free, gluten-free penne. But when we take those grains, crush them to a fine powder, and mold them into a toothsome-enough vessel for my all’Amatriciana with guanciale, I risk overeating because of their lack of medicinal undertones. 

We must eat enough healthy fats and calories to keep our skin from looking like a biohacker’s, but not so much that it resembles a Liver King’s. I’m okay with inundating my Souen bowl with tahini sauce because the earthen flavor of brown rice counteracts the tahini’s fat. This allows me to chew without regret, despite knowing that tahini has more calories than bacon.

So the next time you crave a gluten-free pasta or a chicken-free tender, boil up a pot of sobering brown rice to remember what it’s all about. Your body can tell when something has been processed to the point that it’s no longer alive. Even whole foods can be ruined if you push them too far. 

Speaking of Whole Foods, it took them turning into an Amazon return center for me to rediscover the produce section of my (regular) supermarket. It might not be the same outside of Southern California, but my local Ralphs, Albertsons, and Pavilions markets’ produce sections are shitting on Whole Foods. These supermarkets of my childhood now feel like mom-and-pop small businesses in comparison. Their apple stackers take pride in their work. Their herbs are greener, wetter, and half the price of the ones from Bezos Farms. By dinnertime, the Whole Foods avocado bins look like they were sorted with the care of a pig farmer’s trough.

Whole Foods’ produce section was the foundation of its entire brand. The only literal whole foods they still sell have been essentially sunsetted. On a recent visit, they were out of stock of multiple staples, like iceberg lettuce, red onions, and jalapeños. The stuff they did have didn’t look any better than what a Walmart would offer. As soon as Straus Family Creamery expands its stockist list and the Snake River Farms–ification of America finalizes, I won’t be darkening Whole Foods’ sliding doorway again. On a recent episode of How Long Gone, our guest, Katie, aka Waxahatchee, recommended I try Alexandre Family Farms grass-fed A2/A2 organic regenerative milk. That’s a mouthful. I picked up a jug today and will see if it’s sweeter than Straus.

I have a long-running relationship with orange juice. It’s been my “chuggable chilled orange” since childhood and will likely appear on my death-row tasting menu. I have decades-old memories of that first sip at the breakfast table with my blueberry Eggo—the cold sting of frozen, concentrated pulp water down my parched throat. I eventually graduated to liquid orange juice and was more than happy with the Tropicanas of the world. I started living even higher on the hog when I reached high-school age, and on special occasions, I would get to drink freshly squeezed. 

I recently realized that, a couple of years ago, I had quietly quit any and all OJ that was not squeezed for me that day. I tried to think if there were any other foods I’ve drawn such a hard line on, and I’m the same way with popcorn, and cookies. This occurred to me while I was watching a recent episode of Curb. Larry provides his own vetted eggs and bread from home for the chef at his country club to prepare instead of their Sysco slop. 

But freshly squeezed orange juice is expensive. The 32-ounce guy at Whole Foods is $10 and tastes good enough, but I don’t know what went into it, when, or where. So I started juicing at home, and here is what you get for the same amount of money—not counting 18 minutes of labor and a kitchen lightly coated in orange mist. 

At Whole Foods, $10 worth of bagged supersweet navel oranges, 14 in total, gave me about 46 ounces of (pulp-free) juice. I used this juicer, and it took me 18 minutes to cut, squeeze, strain, and clean everything. This knife works best. Straining pulp in a sieve like this is my least favorite part of the otherwise simple process. Some people throw the juice, pulp and all, into a blender to mix it all up, but that feels disrespectful to the fruit. It spins the life out of it—baby-shaking behavior. 

Update: I just bought a $10 sack of navel oranges from Rick’s Produce Market, which yielded 78 ounces of juice(!), almost double the Whole Foods yield (and double the flavor). Rick also sells a 16-ounce orange juice for $5. Okay, small business!

Like everything you eat, your juice is only as good as your oranges, and squeezing your own can be a dice roll in the flavor department. But when you do it yourself, you can make your own blends, like the Portuguese do with their wines. Try six navel oranges, eight mandarin Cuties, and 1.5 pomelos. And, like wine, you’ll be able to reflect on and reminisce about old vintages. In the end, is it worth juicing yourself? Only if you’re freelance.

Rumors & Ramblings

• On a recent episode of How Long Gone, we discovered a well-known foodfluencer’s internet provisions shop. We expressed interest in an $18 freeze-dried sourdough starter named “Willa.”

• The Erewhon hot-bar line, like Katz’s Deli, can be stress-inducing. At a recent visit to Erewhon’s Pasadena location, I witnessed a white granny ask her helper what “birria” was. A dead silence struck the sneezeguard after the sound of a record scratch. Other heroes and I stepped up to answer her quickly. We all looked at each other, back at her, and collectively realized we should just tell her it’s “shredded beef” and keep it moving.

• I also noticed Erewhon selling a tidy-looking mortadella sandwich for $18, more calzone than focaccia. Mortadella sandwiches have come a long way, from a gas station in Italy to America’s top hot bar. Are we post-Mortadell now?

  

  the cilantro

• Popular podcaster and Huberman hugger Lex Fridman, in a recent Twitter post, explained his travel diet:
  

  

  First off, it’s not a bad-looking patty. I’m dying to know where he orders this plain hamburger served on the bottom half of a rotisserie chicken container, whenever, wherever he’s traveling.

• I learned recently at a group dinner that Australian people “don’t really do” to-go boxes. Something to think about.

• 

  What year was this sign printed? I’m going 1997.

  Cafe Tropical reopened in Silver Lake. Just look at that sign. Nobody did a hangover breakfast like them. I’d order a giant Cuban coffee, carrot-orange juice, and a turkey, egg, and cheese breakfast sandwich (add avo). And yes, I ordered it all en mal español. The cashier would then yell your order across the busy dining room to the cook in the corner. I popped in yesterday for a great guava cheese pie after hitting Lasorted’s for a focaccia sandwich. Tropical is using Collage beans, which is nice. Next week, I plan to press my own Cubano Mortadella at home. Karolyn says, “No pickles, splash of red wine vinegar instead.”

Music Pairing 

NUG, Bong Boat (via Bandcamp)

It’s an ambient record. The band is NUG, and the album is called Bong Boat. The album’s artwork shows a guy smoking a bong on a boat. Does it even matter what this sounds like? It’s got my attention. Don’t listen to this while getting high on a boat—don’t get high on a boat at all. Upon prodding for stories of his Quaalude summers in the ’70s, a childhood friend’s dad once told us about when he popped one on an old dinghy with a few beers and floated down the river. He woke up sometime later, like in the movies, miles downstream, with a waterfall on the horizon.