Buying Food with Your Eyes Instead of Nutrition in Mind

I'm hooked on organic and raw food and find it tough to "swallow" what passes for food on the grocery shelves these days. Why is it hard to find good, organic and raw food? I could blame the food processors or the people who grow the food. But in this article, I am going to blame the consumer. You and I are responsible for picking nutritional food. Not pretty food.

Shopping with your eyes. Beauty vs. Nutrition

What does shopping with your eyes mean? It means falling into the trap of buying foods, especially fresh foods, because of the way they look and not the way they were grown or their nutritional value.

Do you buy perfectly shaped apples or do you buy organic apples that may have a blemish or two and not be uniform? Do you buy tomatoes the same way? To get that "perfect" tomato to catch your eye, it has undoubtedly been sprayed to turn ripe along with the rest of the field it was grown in. The tomato grown in the backyard or some organic grower's field ripens on the vine.

Most fresh produce on your grocery store shelf is not vine ripened. It is planted, grown and ripened in mass. Some of this is done in order to use machines instead of people to pick the produce. Tomatoes are picked with machines. Surprised? Science has been able to create a firmer tomato to withstand machine picking. Chemicals can bring premature tomatoes around to ripening all at once. Do you want that perfect tomato or do you want one grown naturally?

Shopping with your eyes can also involve bottled products.

I can think of no better example of buying with your eyes than that of vinegar. Look for a bottle of Heinz vinegar on the shelf. Whether it is white or brown in color, you can see through it. And I doubt that you will read "raw" on the label. The vinegar looks good to your eyes!

Raw, unfiltered, organic apple cider vinegar looks much different in a bottle. It is a brownish color and you will see something floating in it or you might see sediment in the bottom of the bottle. What is that stuff? It's called mother and it is what makes vinegar such a healing food to consume. We have gotten away from raw foods in this country. In past years, our grandmothers would have loved seeing that in their vinegar! Many were making their own vinegar and it looked like the organic vinegar does.

We have decided that looks count more than nutrition. We have stripped the "raw" from our food and gone for quick, nice and "it doesn't matter about nutrition". It does matter though. Eating food as unprocessed and raw as you can is far more acceptable to your body than the perfect food on shelves these days.

When you go shopping next time, think about nutrition first and perfection second.