What is Real Food?

Even though it doesn’t grow on trees, Oatie-o's breakfast cereal (you know the one) is whole grain.  It's made from oats and is fortified with vitamins and minerals.  It can lower your cholesterol.  Kids eat it without complaining and it’s an easy breakfast.  Oatie-o's is a real food.

Can it be that easy to detect a real food?

Listen to these words from Sally Fallon from her book Nourishing Traditions:

"Boxed breakfast cereals are made by the extrusion process, in which little flakes and shapes are formed at high temperatures and pressures. Extrusion processing destroys many valuable nutrients in grains, causes fragile oils to become rancid and renders certain proteins toxic. For a new generation of hardy children, we must return to the breakfast cereals of our ancestors."

Our point here is not to belittle Oatie-o's (although we’ve stopped buying puffed or extruded cereal).  The point is that we need to take a step back from what the food industry is saying about their products and take an objective look at what’s being put in front of us and called food.

Defining what real food is involves navigating our many food choices and looking at several aspects of our food.  Most times, when looking at a specific food, answering the question, “Is this a real food?” doesn’t yield a simple “yes” or “no.”  Instead, many foods fall on a continuum of wholesomeness.  And deciding whether the food is acceptable as real food or not is based on the personal standard we’ve set for ourselves.

Even so, we can ask several questions about any given food that will give us a good idea of how we should categorize it.  By prioritizing these questions, we can look at the food overall and make wise choices.

Each home or individual is at a different place in seeking healthy eating.  Each home or individual has different goals and standards.  This makes the definition of real food subjective.

At SC Real Foods, we’ve placed our own priorities on our products when categorizing them.  Maybe yours are different.

Here is the list of some of the questions we ask ourselves:

How nourishing is this food as compared to how un-nourishing it is? OR How nourishing is it overall?
How much processing has been done? AND If it’s been processed, how traditional is the processing ?
Does it have artificial additives & preservatives?
How similar is this food to how it originally came from the ground/animal?
For meat & dairy, was the animal raised naturally in a most healthful way?
What kind of fat is in this?
How much of and how often am I going to eat this?
How much sweetener and what kind is in it?
Is it responsibly grown?
Is it local and sustainable?