Day Twenty Four - Undereating

One thing the Warrior Diet has done for me is increased the amount of quality foods I'm eating. My intake of fruits and vegetables has increased many 2-3 times as much per day than before. I tend to shop more on periphery of the grocery store focusing on the fresh produce and fish and meats. I'm wary of the highly processed foods as they not only wreak havoc on your blood sugar/insulin levels but also complete destroy the ability to enjoy the natural sugars in fruits and vegetables. The other day I listened to an interview with Michael Pollan at Democracy Now. Pollan is the author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and there was point made that really upset me.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, it’s a literary scientific experience now going shopping in the supermarket, because basically the food has gotten more complex. It’s—for the food industry—see, to understand the economics of the food industry, you can’t really make money selling things like, oh, oatmeal, you know, plain rolled oats. And if you go to the store, you can buy a pound of oats, organic oats, for seventy-nine cents. There’s no money in that, because it doesn’t have any brand identification. It’s a commodity, and the prices of commodity are constantly falling over time.

So you make money by processing it, adding value to it. So you take those oats, and you turn them into Cheerios, and then you can charge four bucks for that seventy-nine cents—and actually even less than that, a few pennies of oats. And then after a few years, Cheerios become a commodity. You know, everyone’s ripping off your little circles. And so, you have to move to the next thing, which are like cereal bars. And now there’s cereal straws, you know, that your kids are supposed to suck milk through, and then they eat the straw. It’s made out of the cereal material. It’s extruded.

So, you see, every level of further complication gives you some intellectual property, a product no one else has, and the ability to charge a whole lot more for these very cheap raw ingredients. And as you make the food more complicated, you need all these chemicals to make it last, to make it taste good, to make—and because, you know, food really isn’t designed to last a year on the shelf in a supermarket. And so, it takes a lot of chemistry to make that happen.

I thought about that some more and it started to piss me off that it was so obviously true. Nobody makes money selling bulk items, they've got to process it somehow, most often reducing and nutritional value and then selling it back to you at 10 times the bulk value. I don't think I want to be a major part of that anymore. It just seems so stupid. You're paying more for less and getting sick because of it. I'm not against people making money and I think they should be able to sell whatever they want but I don't have to buy it and I've already started buying fresh and bulk.

Today I got a 5.5+ pound bag of steel-cut oats for $4.40. That comes to 79 cents a pound! Do you know how many servings of oatmeal 5.5 pounds of oats makes? The comparison would probably be a 55-count Quaker-Instant Oats box retailing at $16.00. Even if you're adding sugar to your oats you'd still be saving money not to mention the loads more nutrition you'd be getting. So I'm slowly building up some bulk grains in the pantry and I've been buying fresh meats at the grocery store to bring home and cook, like the shrimp yesterday.

Also, for the past several years I've entered into an agreement with a local farm that delivers fresh produce/bread/milk/grass-fed beef to my door once a week. I found them through Local Harvest. There's a whole slew of different agreements out there depending on the farm. Mine has several options but I rarely need to go produce shopping during the season and I'll probably make better use of it this year thanks to what I learned on the Warrior Diet. Not to mention it supports local small family farms over polluting corporate feed lots. Nice to have local small farms in the areas, big factory feed lots stink, both literally and figuratively.

Anyway, I had my protein shake and banana this morning and then a nectarine and some blackberries for lunch. I'll probably have an apple this afternoon sometime. This is one thing I don't see me changing too much after this experiment, the under-eating phase. I'll probably stick with fruits and vegetable during the day as I find it so freeing and energizing. I may experiment with eating something as soon as I wake up for workout fuel but I haven't felt the need for it much at all.