Sometimes, it’s hard to eat healthy. In urban neighborhoods and at travel pit-stops, our food choices are often limited. Restaurants often serve nothing but burgers and soda, and groceries often carry more potato chips than fruit. These food deserts—regions with limited fresh food—have spread all across America. It’s made healthy eating hard; and sometimes, near impossible. In fact, food deserts have contributed to our massive obesity crisis. How, then, can we eat healthy when we have no control over our food choices?
With a little resourcefulness, you can often find healthy food items when you’re trapped in a food desert. If you can find a nearby grocery, you can almost certainly build a balanced, healthy meal covering all five food groups. And even when you’re stuck eating at a convenience store, all may not be lost. Your food won’t be gourmet, but at least you won’t have to settle for a greasy burger.
Here are three key strategies:
- Scout around. There might be a grocery store nearby. You’re much better off eating lunch at a supermarket than at a restaurant or at a gas station. Grocery stores are more likely to carry unprocessed food.
- Eat whole, unprocessed foods. Processed foods are stripped of their nutrients, and are often bundled with extra fat, sugar, and chemicals. They’re also more expensive.
- Follow the food pyramid. To eat a balanced diet, you’ll need grains, beans, vegetables, fruits, and dairy (1). If you can’t get all the groups, just do the best you can.
Here are the tactics for each food group:
- Fruit: Buy fresh, not canned. Don’t get picky about the type of fruit; cheap, common fruits are fine. Oranges, bananas, and apples are packed with fiber and micronutrients like Vitamin C and phytochemicals.
- Dairy: Get whole or low-fat milk. Stay away from chocolate milk/flavored yogurt products; they’re loaded with sugar and preservatives. It’s much better to drink organic, but conventional milk is acceptable in a pinch.
- Meat: You don’t need any. Organic meat would be acceptable, but I doubt you’ll find pastured beef in a food desert. To get enough protein, eat some beans and nuts. It should be easy to find a package of peanuts with no additives besides salt. For beans, scavenge for a can with no extra additives like lard: refried beans are fine. Look for a can with a self-opening top, since you probably won’t want to buy a can opener. Beans aren’t glamorous, but they’re lean and jam-packed with protein. Avoid processed beans like baked beans or chili beans.
- Grains: Stay away from pastries, donuts, and muffins. A loaf of 100% whole wheat bread will give you plenty of energy without excessive sugar or oil. Sometimes, I’ll carry a box of oatmeal with me. Secret tip: If you’re not picky, you don’t need to boil oats in water. I eat them all the time in their raw, dry form.
- Vegetables: This food group is the hardest of all: I’ve never seen a convenience store carry veggies. However, if you have access to a grocery store, you’ll have plenty to choose from. Any common vegetable will do: carrots, tomatoes, and lettuce are all fine. Buy some bell peppers and cucumbers and wash them in a bathroom sink. Eat them raw. If you buy a salad, throw away the ranch dressing (better yet, return it to the clerk).
Be sure to avoid these common pitfalls:
- Don’t eat out. By preparing your own meals, you can better control what goes in it.
- Stay away from brand names. Commercially trademarked “food products,” such as Cheetos or Coca-Cola, are often loaded with harmful additives like corn syrup, sugar, hydrogenated oils, food dyes, and preservatives. They also lack vitamins and minerals.
- Minimize packaging. Most things packaged in excessive plastic or aluminum aren’t good for you. Unflavored, canned beans or tuna are the only exceptions I can think of.
- Stay away from conventional meat. In all likelihood, you already eat plenty of meat. Conventional meat products are extremely bad for the environment, and often contains added oils, fats, sugars, and chemicals.
- Don’t drink sweetened beverages. This includes not only soda, but also fruit juice. Juice is only healthy when you prepare it yourself and don’t discard the fiber. Most commercial juices have tons of added sugar, and virtually all of them discard the natural fiber. Watch out for deceptive labeling–a juice-flavored drink isn’t really juice.
- Avoid food that never spoils. Fresh food is more nutritious. Food products with a perpetual shelf life–ramen noodles, candy, microwave burritos–are highly processed.
By following my own guidelines, I’ve managed to scrape by in food deserts while traveling. Even when most restaurants were selling junk food, I was able to maintain a healthy weight eating whole-wheat bread and bananas while drinking milk.
Hopefully we’ll have some real alternatives soon. But until then, we need to be resourceful scavengers of the food desert.
How difficult is it for you to get fresh fruits and veggies? How about organic food?
- The USDA updated the pyramid; the meat section has been replaced with protein. Protein from beans/nuts, the USDA says, is plenty.
Dry beans and peas may be counted as part of the “meat, poultry, fish, dry beans, eggs, and nuts group.”
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A group of volunteers from the Brooklyn Food Coalition went around and mapped all the local food sites and what types of fresh food they served. The data is available at their site, Food Census. Let me know if any of you have seen similar done on a national scale; the rest of us could sure use it.
Hey Aaron!
I’ve been meaning to check out your blog for a while but it wasn’t until today that I finally decided to do so. I’ve only read this one article so far but I found it interesting and even relatable to the average consumer. I myself am not an expert on the process of food manufacture and so I cannot vouch for the veracity of your article. However, I did find one factual error and I am concerned there may be more, especially since there is only one citation directly related to your 1000-word article.
The concern I have is that you implore the reader to “Buy fresh [produce], not canned.” The rest of the information in the bullet point cites the nutritional content of fresh produce which leads me to speculate that you are assuming that the canning process renders canned produce inferior to the fresh variety either by 1) destroying the original nutrient content of the food and/or 2) adding unnecessary and unhealthful preservatives. If so, both points are untrue. Below, I’ve linked to a study by the University of Illinois that finds the nutritional content of canned food comparable and sometimes better (vitamins A and C are more stable in the canning process) than that of fresh produce. Though additives like sodium and corn syrup in fruits are commonly cited as reasons not to buy canned food, preservatives are not used in the canning process (which is why low sodium and no sodium variants of canned foods exist) and corn syrup is usually added for caloric density and is a choice of the manufacturer rather than a consequence of the canning process.
The study I have linked to is not the exception to other studies nor is my point controversial. The idea that canned food and fresh food are comparable in nutritional content is overwhelmingly supported by study after study and if you Google something similar to “fresh food versus canned food” you will have a hard time finding a link that supports the contrary view (I clicked through the first page of links to be sure). The only exception to the case is when produce is picked and eaten immediately but in the context of the grocery store that you are using where produce must travel for several days, this case does not apply except when picking produce from a home garden.
http://www.mealtime.org/uploadedFiles/Mealtime/Content/1997_nutrition_study_final.pdf
As I said before, I am concerned that there may be further errors that I, as a layperson on the subject of nutrition, cannot discern. Much of what you say falls under “common sense” but common sense is not always a reliable indicator nor is it always correct. If you could cite much more than you currently do, I would be more compelled to give this article serious weight. The ideas particularly in need of citations (linking to your own blog doesn’t count) are your push for eating organic meat (third bullet point under “tactics”) and your claims against conventional meat (fourth bullet point under “common pitfalls”). There is currently controversy over whether organic food really is healthier than conventionally produced food and further citations would certainly help bolstering your arguments in these politically charged times.
Hi Dennis,
Thanks for the thoughtful critique.
Canned fruit is bad mostly because it’s usually soaked in syrup; that extra sugar can lead to diabetes. Moreover, canned fruit often contains artificial flavorings and food colorings. Thirdly, most of the fiber (fruit peels) is removed from the fruit.
If you can your own fruit at home, it wouldn’t be so unhealthy. But I was writing about the types of canned fruit you’d find at a typical convenience store.
Given the choice between fresh and canned, my gut feeling is that the fresh one is more nutritious. The American Heart Association seems to imply that fresh is probably healthier.
Why? The more you process food, the more nutrients tend to be lost. If produce is washed, cooked, or left to age, it probably loses some nutrition. Properly-canned food doesn’t lose much nutrition to flash heating; however, it does tend to be old. I don’t have any exact figures for this; just a gut feeling.
In environmental terms, fresh fruit is probably uses less energy. The aluminum used for canning requires a lot of electricity to produce. It also produces a lot of garbage if you don’t recycle.
Conventional meat is probably worse than organic meat. People who sit around all day, eating junk food and watching TV, won’t be in great shape. The same can be said for animals locked in cages and concentrated feedlots. Many conventionally raised animals never get to exercise. Organically raised meat are allowed to roam open pasture and eat natural diets. For this reason, organic cuts of meat tend to be leaner.
Organic meat can also be less harmful for the environment. Pastured beef, for example, is raised on grass rather than corn. This results in a massive savings in petroleum. It’s also kinder to cows.
Aaron,
I took a closer look at your post and see that you were right in saying that most of the readers do not really care too much about careful citation. When I suggested careful citation, I had only read this article and since it was informative and prone to giving suggestions I was under the impression that you were speaking to and convincing a skeptical audience. However, I looked through some of your other posts and their corresponding comments and found that your audience primarily agrees with your viewpoint and that there is practically zero dissension. In that light, I agree that carefully citing your information is not a big concern. However, I do maintain that there are factual errors in this article.
In regards to your response to my comments, you are absolutely right in pointing out that the syrup and sugar are the real health culprits in canned fruits. However, canned fruit is now commonly packed in water and it is this variety that is comparable to fresh produce in nutrition. In reading the comments I originally wrote, I did not make it clear that I was referring to canned fruit packed in water as having the most comparable nutrition content to fresh produce.
Additionally, your point equating more processing with more nutrient degradation is still erroneous. Your paragraph beginning with the question “Why?” claims that canned food tends to be older than fresh produce. That is not true. Canneries are located very close to where the food is grown so that produce is only several days old before it’s canned. The heating inherent to the canning process renders microorganisms and their associated enzymes inactive, thereby arresting all spoilage. Fresh produce, however, takes 1-2 weeks to arrive from where it’s grown. That makes fresh produce older in terms of spoilage and biological activity. In fact, fresh fruits are sprayed with ethylene gas in order to accelerate ripening and artificially add to the biological age of the produce.
Also, the whole fruit or vegetable is used when it is canned so that your claim, “most of the fiber (fruit peels) is removed from the fruit,” is misinformed. Your point is further disproved by the fact that canned fruit has a comparable amount of fiber to fresh produce, as concluded in the overwhelming majority of studies. In fact, there is mounting evidence that the canning process makes fiber more soluble.
I also read your link from the American Heart Association and I don’t agree with your assessment that the link implies fresh produce to be superior to canned produce. While the sentence you quote certainly implies that fresh foods are the best form of produce, the paragraph before it claims “Be sure to buy and eat plenty of fresh or frozen fruits and vegetables,” and three sentences later, “For desserts, buy fresh or canned fruits (in water without added sugars), dried fruit (without added sugars), and gelatin that contains fruit, instead of baked goods and sweets.” These two sentences plus the one you quoted are all the sentences in the article that directly compare fresh produce to canned produce in the same sentence. Looking at the article as a whole, that’s 2 sentences treating fresh and canned fruit equivalently to 1 preferring fresh food over canned. Since the article is very short and self-contradicting, I doubt the link is an authoritative stance on the American Heart Association’s opinion of canned food versus fresh food.
Thank you for responding to my comments in such a timely manner and I apologize that I could not produce a response as quickly as you were able to. I hope these comments are conducive to improving your blog, particularly when it comes to using your “gut feeling” as a source of information.
Dennis
Hey Dennis,
Glad to see you back. Before I continue, let me explain that I used to think like you. I used to spurn conventional wisdom and the organic movement–I too was a biologist/chemist/pre-med student–until I actually studied the organic movement with an open mind. Two movies, Food Inc. and The Future of Food, really helped change my perspective.
I don’t know where you get your canned fruit, but from my experience, the ones that are commonly available have no fruit peels and are usually soaked in syrup. Even if the fruit is soaked in fruit juice, that juice has been depleted of all its fiber. Let me repeat: it doesn’t matter how good canning is in theory, if in practice it’s low in fiber and loaded with sugar. I have never seen canned fruit packed in water at a mainstream store like Costco or 7-11; at best, canned fruit is packed in fruit juice. If you can convince the manufacturers of canned fruit to change their ways so that they don’t add syrup and they include pulp in fruit juice, then I won’t criticize canned fruit for health reasons.
But even if canned fruit is healthy, it’s still not sustainable. Remember, part of this site is about sustainable, green living. The embodied energy of aluminum is massive (~200MJ of energy per kg of virgin aluminum), which means that using aluminum packaging wastes electricity and contributes to climate change. And yes, recycling wastes electricity, too. Again, I am not criticizing home-canned foods. I am criticizing the type of canned food you find at a food desert.
You are right about conventional fruits using ethylene. But actually, that’s another reason for why we should choose organic. Sustainably-produced, natural fruits don’t use ethylene–they are actually allowed to ripen naturally, which means they are probably more nutritious.
Part of the reason why canned food can appear more nutritious than raw food is because canned food is cooked. Some fruits, like tomatoes, release more of their nutrients once they are cooked. This probably has more to do with cooking than it does with the canning process. Personally, I think either way of enjoying tomatoes–cooked or raw–is fine.
aren’t as silly as they sound. Most people don’t have the time to spend years reading the latest medical journals to determine whether or not something is nutritious. No one should need a PhD to figure out what to eat for lunch. The more complicated you make food and nutrition, the less likely people will actually follow through. Using simpler rules of thumb–eat fresh and organic rather than processed and canned–makes healthy eating simpler and more attainable for average people like me.
When I get the time, I’d like to explain in more detail why organic/sustainably-produced is healthier. But for the most part, I’ve avoided citations because most of them are done haphazardly, and I believe that it’s totally unhelpful. Just because a is published doesn’t mean it’s true–it takes time to evaluate. There’s a good chance that over 50% of the being published in leading scientific journals today are utterly absurd. One day, a medical journal will praise canned fruit for nutrition, and the next day they’ll rail on the aluminum can for being a source of carcinogens. If I just randomly grabbed articles and cited them as , I’d have to read it and evaluate it, and my reader would have too as well. Again, for a question as simple as , I feel like this is overkill.
Hi Aaron. I think your comments about “food deserts” are very applicable to families who travel. Whenever we took our kids on a vacation trip, or drove to southern California to visit their grandparents, we always brought an ice chest with healthier (and more affordable) food choices than what we could find at fast food places, convenience stores, or “family” restaurants like Denny’s. Whole grain bread, nut butters, cheese, fresh fruit, low-sodium V8 (I know it’s canned), homemade low-sugar oatmeal cookies, Cheerios, and 1% milk were our staples. At least breakfast and lunch could be reasonably healthy and no more expensive than eating at home.
Hi Karen,
That’s a great idea. I’ll consider carrying an ice chest next time I travel. Hsinya’s parents do something similar when they go on family trips.
For me, the toughest food desert is the airport. They won’t let you bring food in your carry-on luggage, and once you’re inside, you can only choose from the limited cafeterias/in-plane meals. Last time, I just settled for eating their vegetarian meals. I returned about 1/3rd of what they served, because even the vegetarian options were filled with sugar and oil.
Hey there, just stumbled on this blog and am reading through all of it. It’s really awesome to see “greenimalist” living taken seriously and put into action. I wish the blog was still active though! Anyway, thanks for the great writings.