I do it all the time: stand in the store with a cheap, antibiotic-filled, non-organic chicken in one hand and an expensive, organic, free-range chicken in the other and internally debate how much I can pay for healthier food that week. Sometimes I go for the cheap chicken, antibiotics and all – I’m not gonna lie! But when I remember that I’m voting for or against sustainable foods with my purchases, I try to diligently budget for the healthier option.

Stonyfield Farm

Fast Company is running a series of interviews with leaders in sustainable food, and the CEO of Stonyfield Farm pointed out that we are all paying for unhealthy food in indirect ways.

We don’t know what real food is as a culture, as a society. We’re not ready to pay for it. We have this illusion that food not only can, but should be, cheap. I call it an illusion because we do end up paying it, through our bodies and also our planet. We really have to restore to help the financial state of our farmers. There is a whole host of consequences to eating unsustainably, but we don’t measure them because they’re externalities. They don’t appear on our income statements, but they’re real costs. One in three kids born after 2000 will be a diabetic, and that’s one in two if it’s Hispanic or African American. Two-thirds of Americans are obese or overweight, and we’re spending billions to deal with those problems. Those are the consequences of cheap food. It’s not cheap at all.

That’s terrifying. I’m renewing my commitment to myself to not only cook healthy food, but to buy sustainable food products – especially when I’m cooking for the people I love.

If you’re interested, I also recommend reading the interview with Paul Willis of Niman Ranch.

[Note that I’m not advocating buying Stonyfield Farm or Niman Ranch products in particular; just that we become more informed about the source of our food so we can all make choices we’re comfortable with.]

Yeah, you can make your own ketchup, but it never comes out tasting like real ketchup. There’s something about Heinz ketchup that is uniquely ketchupy in a way that can’t be replicated by homemade or other brands, isn’t there? This article explains why. It’s incredible, definitely worth a read for anyone interested in the taste of food (i.e. everyone).

The Ketchup Conundrum:

There are five known fundamental tastes in the human palate: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. Umami is the proteiny, full-bodied taste of chicken soup, or cured meat, or fish stock, or aged cheese, or mother’s milk, or soy sauce, or mushrooms, or seaweed, or cooked tomato. “Umami adds body,” Gary Beauchamp, who heads the Monell Chemical Senses Center, in Philadelphia, says. “If you add it to a soup, it makes the soup seem like it’s thicker—it gives it sensory heft. It turns a soup from salt water into a food.” When Heinz moved to ripe tomatoes and increased the percentage of tomato solids, he made ketchup, first and foremost, a potent source of umami. Then he dramatically increased the concentration of vinegar, so that his ketchup had twice the acidity of most other ketchups; now ketchup was sour, another of the fundamental tastes. The post-benzoate ketchups also doubled the concentration of sugar—so now ketchup was also sweet—and all along ketchup had been salty and bitter. These are not trivial issues. Give a baby soup, and then soup with MSG (an amino-acid salt that is pure umami), and the baby will go back for the MSG soup every time, the same way a baby will always prefer water with sugar to water alone. Salt and sugar and umami are primal signals about the food we are eating—about how dense it is in calories, for example, or, in the case of umami, about the presence of proteins and amino acids. What Heinz had done was come up with a condiment that pushed all five of these primal buttons. The taste of Heinz’s ketchup began at the tip of the tongue, where our receptors for sweet and salty first appear, moved along the sides, where sour notes seem the strongest, then hit the back of the tongue, for umami and bitter, in one long crescendo. How many things in the supermarket run the sensory spectrum like this?