Here we are! Read this first

I didn’t grow up thinking of food as a collection of claims printed on a package. With a background in nutrition and a perspective shaped outside the United States, I learned to look at food differently: what it contains, how it is made, and what it actually does for us.

I grew up in a tiny town in rural Switzerland, where my mother cooked from scratch for a family of five. Three meals a day. And mind you, we didn’t even have a dishwasher. There was no DoorDash. No drive-thru. No takeout place around the corner. In fact, there was pretty much ZERO takeout food in our town.

If we wanted to eat, somebody had to cook. So that’s what we did. Real potatoes were peeled. Vegetables were washed and chopped. Soup started in a pot, not a can. Dinner didn’t arrive in a cardboard box with a list of ingredients you needed a chemistry degree to pronounce. And somehow, we survived. 😄

I still cook from scratch today. And when I do buy packaged food, I read the label. Every single time. Not the beautiful front of the package with the green leaves, happy chickens, giant words like NATURAL, and a smiling family apparently having the greatest Tuesday night ever.

I turn the package around and read. Because the back of the package is where things get interesting.

Living in America has made me wonder about food almost every day. How did we get to the point where so much highly processed food became completely normal? How did breakfast become dessert in a cereal bowl? How did we decide that something containing 27 ingredients, three kinds of sugar, and a paragraph of additives is simply called a “snack”?

And why are so many of us trying desperately to eat better while being surrounded by food that has been engineered, packaged, and marketed to convince us that we already are?

That is what Eat the Label is about.

It’s not me telling you that you can never eat a cookie again.

It’s about thinking about food.

We’ll turn packages around. Question things we’ve been told for years. Look at ingredients. Talk about carbs, protein, fat, portions, marketing tricks, “healthy” foods that may not be quite as healthy as they look, and perfectly ordinary foods that have somehow gotten a bad reputation.

Once you really start paying attention to what you eat and how it is sold to you, there is plenty to talk about.

You don’t need to become a nutrition expert.

I’m not one.

Or... maybe I am?

I’ve been eating food since 1967 and I’m still alive.

I AM AN EXPERT!! 😂

Okay, for the record, and possibly for my legal protection, I do not have a degree from some fancy food college.

I was, however, trained and certified as a pastry chef and chocolatier in Switzerland over 40 years ago. And yes, despite the fact that we spent our days making sugary, buttery, chocolate-covered everything, we were actually required to study and understand nutrition.

The irony is not lost on me. 😄

So no, I’m not here wearing a white coat and handing out medical advice. I’m here as someone who has spent a lifetime cooking, working with food, reading labels, thinking about nutrition, and asking questions.

And I think we should all be asking a few more of them.

So let’s do this together. Let’s question things. Let’s turn packages around. Let’s figure out what we’re actually eating.

Welcome to Eat the Label.

Let’s turn the package around.

Before we really get into Eat the Label, I should tell you something.

The first post in this series actually went up months ago.

And then... I kind of left it sitting there.

Not because I had nothing else to say. Quite the opposite.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted this blog to become.

Did I want to keep it safe, polite, and agreeable?

Or did I want to actually say what I think?

Eventually, I decided on the second one.

So yes, I suppose I’m officially volunteering to become a little bit of a troublemaker. 😄

Because when you start looking closely at the way we eat, the way food is marketed to us, and the kind of nutrition we’ve simply accepted as “normal,” there are a lot of things worth questioning.

And I think it’s time we do. for it

The WE ARE WHAT WE EAT  post is the one I wrote months ago. Think of it as our little Nutrition 101 refresher before we start causing trouble.