15
So, I’m not one bit surprised that the once-scorned pasta, with its robust shelf-life, ease of preparing and versatility in dishes has made a comeback in shopping trollies nationwide. Speaking as a Registered Dietitian, pasta has a lot to offer us nutritionally. It’s a carbohydrate powerhouse, a good source of protein and add a rich meat-ey and tomato-ey ragu and you got yourself a balanced meal. The Covid-19 pandemic calls us to wonder why pasta was ‘cancelled’ in the first place.
Access to less-available ‘health foods’ (soya bean pasta for instance…) may be a source of anxiety for very health conscious individuals. I specialise in intuitive eating and an anti-diet approach to nutrition and health. That means my philosophy is that all foods are morally neutral and should be treated as such. There is no such thing as good or bad foods, all foods play a role in our lives under different circumstances.
So can regular white pasta be a substitute for your usual, more expensive, more ‘elite’ soya alternative? Abso-frickin-lutely. Does the thought of consuming regular pasta freak you out a bit? Do you even label this as a ‘bad’ food choice while your health-shop alternative is ‘good’? This may be an exhibition of disordered eating tendencies (known in the scientific literature as Orthorexia) or perhaps your reaction is an invitation to check in with your privilege, because to have access to exactly what food you want, right down to the core ingredient, is a privilege that many are denied.
Covid-19 is also shining a light on the role our fridge-freezers play in surviving this. As we enter into a warm Spring, fresh food doesn’t stay fresh for long when left at room-temperature. Many around the globe are thankful for the ability to freeze food to maintain freshness however this also is a cause of concern of some. Isn’t freezer food bad? Less healthy? More processed?
Oftentimes, frozen fruit and vegetables are preserved at their peak of their freshness and may offer more nutritional value than their fresh counterparts. Tinned fruit and veg are even less glamorous but their nutritional content is also maintained during the canning process. Dried noodle pots, frozen pizzas, jarred curry sauces and microwaveable packaged meals all provide us with comparable nutrition as their fresh equivalents and, in times of high anxiety about the future – they lighten the burden of cooking meals from scratch too.
Continued overleaf