SippitySup

October Unprocessed: Day 21

October Unprocessed: Sippity Sup

Today is Day 21 of Andrew Wilder’s Eating Rules October Unprocessed Challenge. I’ve decided to join the party by writing a guest post about my year-round frustration with “enriched pasta”.

If you know October Unprocessed, then you probably understand that participants are challenged to go a whole month without eating processed foods. The definition of just what constitutes “processed” is personal and I’m not here to define it for you. But I will say, I like Andrew’s explanation of just what defines processed food. He says processed food is any food you can’t make at home, in your own kitchen, using whole food ingredients.

By this definition, common sense says that pasta should not be considered processed. It’s an ancient food– handmade for centuries with the simplest of ingredients (flour and water). But like everything in the modern food world, pasta has gotten complicated. Pasta for the American market is often made from flour that contains several types of vitamin additives designed to replace some of the nutrition that gets removed in the grinding and separating of whole wheat into white flour. The easy answer to this problem is to simply make your own fresh pasta using egg, flour and water. Or if you don’t want to go to the bother, there are a lot of whole wheat pasta choices that pass Andrew’s kitchen test. These are perfectly logical solutions for the month of October. However, if you’re a real pasta purist, the limitations of these two solutions won’t be acceptable every time. Real Italian-style pasta is one of life’s great pleasures.

So I’ve joined Andrew’s group to help explain why choosing pasta isn’t as simple as it should be.

I hope you’ll pop over and read my post. Joining October Unprocessed wasn’t an easy decision for me. I’m not a joiner by nature. I won’t jump off a bridge just because you did. I don’t go on tour group vacations. I don’t read self-help books. I don’t like spectator sports and I won’t hold your place in line if I’ve never met you before. But when it comes to pasta– well, I’m a whole other fella (at least for October). GREG