Quote Originally Posted by smilingcat View Post
We refused to buy anything made in China, not because we are racist, but rather because they have such poor safety track. Toothpaste sweetened with ethylene-glycol(anti freeze), dog&cat food, monkfish turned out to be puffer fish full of tetrodoxin (works on nerves and you stop breathing), other fish contaminated with fungacide, industrial red dye used in eggs...

Unfortunately, the labels do not indicate where the ingredients came from. So you could be eating something made in USA and have wheat glutin from China.

Needless to say, my housemate and I rarely eat any pre-processed food. Only processed food is ice-cream, pasta made in Italy, artisan bread (cause I been bit lazy about baking our own whole wheat bread).

Smilingcat
And it is still possible to have a predominantly Asian style or even many Chinese cuisine dishes that adopt whole foods approach with just a few ingredients and no/very little ingredients from China. My mother's cooking is a testament to that. So when I get lazy, I just fall on dishes that she made for us as a child.

To me, whole foods eating...is new spin on something very old and taken for granted. If you take some of the world's traditional major cuisines and just focus on the dishes that have very little fat (and some cuisines don't use any butter)/no fat, no processed ingredients that contain sugar, chemicals in itself (ie. ketchup), lean meat/no meat, herbs/spices and focus on TECHNIQUE, then life ..really is a breeze to understand whole foods eating and cooking.

At its most simplest level, is to take any cuisine not at the gourmet level, but start right at the level how the peasants prepared their food where there was /is little money to buy pre-packaged/chemically treated food, that is another way to approach.

I haven't bought Italian dried pasta in the past 12 months. I now find it lighter on my palate to choose Asian dried pasta or occasionally thin fresh vermecelli.

Bread is from the artisan bakery that uses no chemicals, no sugar nor butter. Just make sure you don't ask for it presliced, otherwise the bread will harden faster (because it doesn't have chemicals to keep it soft). We just slice off a piece the loaf whenever we need a slice.

I actually didn't realize I had been cooking whole foods style most of time, until I started to look more closely at other people's shopping carts at the checkout or down aisles of mind-boggling pre-processed foods in plastic bags, cans and jars. While convenience cooking is a great thing and fine for 3-4 dishes per month, it is pretty shocking what is on the grocery shelves that have an abundance of chemical additives for preservation.

The pre-processed foods that we do have at home are: soy sauce (salt-reduced. Am working on reducing my intake.), capers (used maybe every 2-3 months), mustard (lots of brands that are fantastic without sugar), chili paste, occasionally sauerkraut (it's hard to find without sugar), soy black-bean garlic chili paste (I try to use sparingly), balsamic vinegar (we have several different flavours). We have alot of dried spices and herbs. And seem to have on hand at any time, 2-3 types of fresh herbs.