A Welcome and Introduction

Welcome to Good Ingredients, an incomprehensive but hopefully well examined and insightful exploration of what food components I think qualify as "good" and why.

Why focus on ingredients? For one, we've all heard the saying that good food starts with good ingredients, or something to that effect (perhaps in part thanks to Papa John's take on it in their motto, "Better Ingredients, Better Pizza"). So as an amateur cook it is my interest because of the enjoyment, the art of the process, and also the health concerns.

By "ingredient," I also don't just mean the items that you find listed in a recipe book (i.e., eggs, milk, sugar, etc.). There are, after all, literally hundreds of different "ingredients" that can be found to constitute the items on a single shelf at the grocery store--far more ingredients, generally, than the names of the products would suggest.

These days, even many ingredients themselves have ingredients.

One of my favorite examples of this phenomenon is the humble bread crumb. How many ingredients would you expect to find in your run of the mill canister of store brand bread crumbs?

If you said one, or even five, congratulations--you are a raging optimist.

In fact, you could be off the mark by around 30 ingredients with some typical brands. Commercially manufactured bread crumbs have one of the most deceptively complicated ingredient lists, including growth inhibitors, anti-caking agents, flavor enhancers, and more. Beginning to wonder why someone would put that much effort into your bread crumbs?

Well, good, then. A healthy sense of curiosity is definitely a requisite of this topic. Hopefully, over time, you'll get a sense of my sense of what are good ingredients, and then make some informed decisions for yourself.

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The basic premise of "better ingredients make better food" makes sense and is hard to argue with. A much more interesting discussion is what makes ingredients good or bad. It's ultimately an opinion, of course, so a more useful way to pose that question would be, what advantages and disadvantages, if any, do the ingredients in our food have?

I should be clear that this is not a scientific study or research project; I'm not a scientist, and I'm not trying to prove my statements beyond all doubt. However, I do try to avoid making any totally unfounded claims.

That being said, even the question of an ingredient's pros vs. cons is often not too challenging when you look at a single item in a typical list of ingredients: there is little point in debating, after all, the usefulness of oats, for example. Nor, among those scientists who have studied them, is there much point debating the ill effects on humans of chemicals that kill mold (in case you were wondering, no--Tilex does not do your body good).

No, the most challenging question to answer, perhaps--one that has certainly led to some of the most heated debate--is at which point, at which quantity or concentration, do such disputed items move from the "good" column over to the "bad" column? In other words, what are you willing to tolerate?

As I mentioned, some ingredients don't require so much debate: eggs, milk, and sugar can be good ingredients in good food. Moderation is the key in the case of such self-explanatory items.

But the question of "how much is too much?" is not easy to answer regarding food additives like preservatives because most of the science does not result in clear cut, black and white conclusions. But neither is there nothing insightful that can be drawn from them collectively.

With a little of this supporting evidence, it is my hope that readers of this blog will come to agree that less of certain "ingredients" is always good, right down to none at all in some cases. At the very least, I think we should be skeptical and careful in consuming that which we know little about.

To be clear on the scope of discussion, I'm not particularly concerned with breaking down the naturally occurring chemical makeup of an item, such as its vitamin and mineral content (but if you are, Nutrition Data is one of the best resources). In the case of animal products however, the chemical makeup is quite relevant because of animals' particular tendency to absorb substances in their environment; although this can and does occur on its own, or even unbeknownst to their farmers altogether, I generally wouldn't consider it "naturally occurring" because the contamination wouldn't exist in the animals' natural habitat and diet--i.e., a clean one. Mercury in fish is just one good example.

There's not much point in ranting without having anything to show in defense of said rants. As such, I think it will be convenient to take single examples of foods or recipies in each post and to over time build a body of knowledge. There are, after all, hundreds if not thousands of "ingredients" to consider ingesting on a typical stroll down a supermarket isle.

In summation, I hope the readers of this blog can develop a critical eye for good ingredients, while not simply having to take someone's word on it.