Cooking Veggies

An article on the New York Times website (Finding the Best Way to Cook All Those Vegetables) suggests that it’s not only what kinds of vegetables you eat, but how you prepare them, which influences their nutritional benefits. In some cases it’s better to cook fruits to release additional nutrients than to eat them raw. In other cases, raw is the better way to go. The confusing bit is that there are no hard and fast rules.

Generally, we’ve seen a shift over the years from the more intuitive approach to food and food knowledge, towards a more “scientific” approach which attempts to look at the fundamental components of food to better understand how it works. We can thank this process for the nutritional information labels on packaged food, for example. It’s clear from this article (if it wasn’t before) that we have a long way to go before we develop a sophisticated scientific understanding. But, it is of course hard to make a strict comparison between this kind of approach and the food knowledge developed over thousands of years of evolution.

What’s interesting to me is where we draw the line: can we trust our bodies and internal mechanisms to direct our food consumption in a healthy way, or must we rely on external systems and methods of assessment to direct our eating habits? Perhaps the external, scientific tools are needed to combat the industrialized food system, which is explicitly designed to exploit or override many of our internal processes (such as our predilection for sweet foods). As a designer, it would be nice to see whether we can develop ways to nurture these more intuitive approaches rather than continue to support more scientific, industrialized food consumption habits.

(To be clear, I don’t have a problem with analyzing food and developing a better understanding of how we can pursue more systematic approaches to nutrition. However, I have a problem with using a single approach to understanding nutrition, especially one which purports to have all the answers and then still has trouble recommending whether it’s better to boil carrots or eat them raw.)