How to Be a Conscious Eater

ith almost every inch of food packaging cov-

ered in superlatives shouting the product’s

attributes, inspecting an item in the grocery

store can feel like being in a noisy, one-sided

conversation. This section will empower you to navigate that

noise. On the whole, the healthiest foods are, well, whole. They

don’t need marketing claims in the first place. Reducing the

amount of packaging in our foodscape—especially single-use

plastics—would also go a long way toward improving your

health and the planet’s health. But there are plenty of mini-

mally or moderately processed foods that are quite virtuous in

all three respects of the Conscious Eater Checklist.

As a general rule, the idea of “clean labels”—those with a

small number of ingredients with simple, intuitive-sounding

names—definitely has some merit. Ingredients with fewer

syllables. Ingredients your grandmother would recognize as

food. To most consumers, clean means natural. But since that

remains a murkily defined term, clean has instead come to

mean familiar. The clean-label movement has brought about a

reckoning with the question of what ingredients and steps in a

“process” are truly necessary to make a given food company’s

processed food product work. Bright colors, shelf life, consis-

tent texture and flavor—these are traits we’ve come to expect

from the products lining our shelves. They’ve been the back-

bone of that industry for decades. But packaged-food giants

have reformulated with a vengeance to stay relevant. More

progressive companies are even expanding their meanings of

clean to include ethical sourcing and sustainability standards.

With many land mines between you and the stuff that comes

from factories, this section will help you determine which pack-

aged foods are worth bringing home—or back to your desk, or to

your kid’s playdate—with clear eyes and confidence.

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