Procure, Prepare, Preserve Maintaining Food’s Nutritional Value

By Alexander Germanis

Mankind’s relationship with food is one that spans a wide spectrum. Some eat only enough to survive, others gorge themselves at every opportunity, and still others dedicate their entire lives to creating the most delectable meals fit for human consumption.

Regardless of one’s personal relationship with food, our bodies require food with the proper minerals and vitamins in order to live healthy lives. Whether shopping for it, cooking it, or preserving it for future use, food needs to have nutritional value, or it fails to serve its main purpose.

Shop for Substance

As cities grew in size and the suburban and urban lifestyles took hold in this country, procuring food, for most of us, became more about going to the grocery store or visiting a restaurant than growing it or making it ourselves.

Things have started to shift back in the other direction as of late, however. More and more people are growing their own vegetables in home gardens and attending farmers’ markets.

In regard to shopping, better nutritional value can also be found in food by making more frequent but shorter trips to the market. This means being able to select fresher food and in smaller amounts in order to reduce waste and avoid foods choked with preservatives.

There are several tips for making your shopping trip more beneficial for your waistline and maybe even your wallet.

1. Make a list of only what you need (not necessarily what you want) before you go to the store and stick to that list. In other words, avoid impulse purchases.
2. Don’t go shopping when you’re hungry. Eat before you go. You’d be surprised how many poor, unhealthy choices you’ll make when your stomach is thinking for you.
3. Just as with selecting your friends, don’t go for flash. Go for substance. Don’t be drawn in by clever or colorful packaging. Look at the parts of the package that count: the nutritional facts and ingredient list. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but I have found the longer the ingredient list, the more chocked full of junk it is.
4. Purchase whole, nutrient-rich foods. No vitamin or mineral supplement pill is as good as getting the real deal from food. In fact, some studies have revealed that repeated consumption of the pills could actually damage your health.
5. When you can find it (admittedly, this may not be so great for your wallet), try to buy locally sourced and organically grown foods. The fresher the food and the less injected with preservatives, the better.

For selecting and storing produce, here’s another set of helpful tips:

1. Use your senses. The smell, color, feel, and even the sounds of the produce can tell you about its freshness. For example, certain fruits like bananas are going to last a bit longer at home if you buy them while they’re still slightly green. Cucumbers and zucchini should be slightly yielding but not squishy. Fruits like apples and pears should be hard and free of blemishes and soft spots. Melons should be firm and have a good water jug sound when rapped with the knuckles.
2. Always keep your produce bagged and kept away from raw meats, poultry, and fish to avoid cross contamination.
3. If the produce has been pre-packaged, it should also be refrigerated in some form. This means keeping it refrigerated when you get it home, as well.

Cook for Quality

Don’t spend all that time stalking the aisles or stalls at the market only to see the nutritional value of your food go up in smoke or get boiled away in the water. When it comes to fruits and vegetables, usually the closer they are to how they were found in nature is the way nature intended them to be eaten.

To preserve as much nutritional value of your food, follow some of these tips for preparation.

1. When boiling or poaching, use as little water as possible.
2. If cooking vegetables, reuse the liquid in the pan afterward. A lot of the nutrients in vegetables actually leech out during the cooking process. Again, the rawer your fruit and vegetables are the better. Cook or steam them for as little time as possible.
3. Don’t peel your vegetables until after cooking them. This might be a little difficult, as they tend to be less stiff and more, well, hot; but this method retains the maximum nutrient and fiber density.
4. Use lower temperatures to cook food. High heat methods often require oils or butter, which add unneeded calories and fats to the food.
5. Try blanching when possible. Blanching means to boil your food quickly, removing it from the hot water and placing it in ice water to halt the cooking process. This retards the loss of nutrients started by the boiling process.

Preserve for Prospective Periods

Before the advent of refrigeration and chemical preservatives, people needed to figure out ways to extend the shelf life of food. Times of famine or long winters often meant finding fresh food was difficult if not impossible, so innovative ways were utilized to preserve food for months or even years. Many of these techniques are still in use today.

1. Canning foods involves heating foods such as fruits or vegetables in order to kill dangerous microorganisms and deactivating enzymes in order to retard spoiling. Air – a major cause of spoilage – is removed during the heating process and a vacuum seal is formed. Preserves like jellies and jams are also prepared in a form of canning.
2. Curing and smoking meats has been around for centuries as a way to maintain its viability as a food source during times of scarcity or through long winters. Salt is used to draw out moisture in the meat and smoke is then applied to further preserve the meat by killing microbes and adding phenols and acids to protect it.
3. Drying or dehydrating can be used to preserve fruits, meats, and seeds. All moisture is removed and, depending on the food, can be readded later to reconstitute it. Using that same water in cooking will preserve the nutrients.
4. Fermenting involves using microorganisms such as yeast to create a chemical reaction, breaking down organic compounds to create new compounds like acids and alcohol.
5. Freezing slows down the growth of microorganisms and the chemical process of spoilage by crystalizing the water in the food to ice, which prevents microbial activity from spoiling the food.
6. Pickling has been around for more than four millennia. Preserving foods in vinegar or a brine solution not only keeps the food from spoiling, but it maintains its nutritional value as well.

Need for Nourishment

Simply having and consuming food is not enough. The nutritional value our foods contain and maintain matters more. The more hectic our lives are, the more we tend to skip eating well and focus instead on eating “conveniently.” A lot of good food, unfortunately, takes time.

But ultra-processed foods are everywhere. From frozen pizzas and sodium-drenched pre-packaged meals to breads that seem to sit on the shelf for months without getting hard or molding, there is more than convenience attached to eating these things. There is an actual danger.

Studies reviewed by the British Medical Journal this year illustrated some shocking findings among the 10 million participants in 45 studies. Eating more ultra-processed foods is linked to 32 health conditions, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and even mental health disorders, among many others.

We need food. More importantly, however, we need proper nutrition from our food. The only way to achieve this is by putting in the effort to seek out, properly prepare, and preserve our foods to make sure they serve their purpose: keeping us alive and healthy in order to enjoy more food.