Astounding News!

Shhhhh.... I'm working on a Unified Consumption Theory.

The basic premise is that we should throw the food pyramid back at the corrupt government who made it and instead eat food in the proportions of how much work it takes for one family to create it before the innovations of the last two hundred years.

A few examples that ran higgildly piggidly through my brain as I came up with this theory:

Vegetables - Easy to grow. Throw some seeds in the ground, water, fertilize, hoe, pick, reap your rewards. Sure, lots of work but nothing compared to everything else... so eat lots of vegetables.

Fruit and Nuts - Medium easy. Plant some apple seeds or raspberry plants, prune, water, wait, grow, grow, a few years later you climb or gather and eat.

Grains - Not as easy as it first appears. Sow seed, water, fertilize, hoe, etc. Then gather up a whole bunch of it, thresh it, sweep up the grain heads and grind them into a flour and make your bread. Or your pasta. Quite a bit of work goes into that one loaf so go sparingly. And this loaf has lots of the germ and vitamins still present. Want fluffy white bread? There's more work involved so by my theory you can eat even less of it.

Sugar - I'm no expert on extracting sugar from beets or growing sugar cane. Heck, I'm not an expert on anything. However I suspect that it takes quite a bit of work. Extended boiling and evaporation may be involved (which it certainly is for maple syrup, which falls into this category) so you have to gather up or cut lots of wood for the fire - loads of work! So use sugar sparingly. As for honey, not a lot of work to harvest but how often do you find bees nests? And hive cultivation, I would suspect, is quite a bit of work so again, go easy on honey.

Meats - If you raise meat then you have to raise grain to feed them... but you don't have to thresh, grind, etc. the grain. Or two hundred years ago you could hunt it. Work but deceptively not as much work as all that threshing. Eat meat. Enjoy meat. Your body knows what to do with it.

Milk and cheese and butter and eggs- Again, you raise the dairy cow and you sit on a bucket and milk away. Then you churn the milk for butter or add cultures and time for cheese. Eat medium amounts.

Beer and wine - This stuff literally grows on trees so enjoy all you want. Or perhaps it takes medium work to ferment and grow the items that go into these. Enjoy moderately.

Chocolate - Now this stuff really does grow on trees. And I can't say anything bad about our friend Chocolate.

So how does this translate to more modern foods?

Ice Cream - Forget the guar gums, look at a package from Breyers. Cream, eggs, sugar. The Cream is medium, the eggs are easy and the sugar is labor-intensive. Plus the hauling of ice and the work involved in churning. Go easy on the ice cream but yogurt and custard are more permissible.

Soft drinks - Water is ultra-easy. High fructose corn syrup and/or aspartame are not. Consider it a treat.

Ring Dings - You've got highly refined "sorta" flour and waxy nearly chocolate-like stuff and sugary whey-based filling. Yeah, a rare treat.

Frosted Sugar Pops - Puffed corn meal coated in so much sugar that you smell it in your urine. It's like candy for breakfast!

What am I missing?