Another Food Sermon From The Reverend R

Feast days like Thanksgiving should remind us all that we eat too much brown food. There is a lot of information about nutrition out there but eating nutritionally is really pretty simple. To be healthy, one needs to eat healthy food. Healthy food is colorful. Generally, the healthiest most colorful food is raw. And raw food is rarely brown or white or beige. But colorful food isn’t necessarily raw. Think of beets or squash, kale, chard or spinach. Even cooked, they retain a nice bright color. Brown food fills us up and makes us feel as if we’ve had a nice meal. Colorful food provides actual nutrition, often without harmful fats and sugars. Think of your plate as a palate. Don’t even note the items. Just look at the color. Is your plate mostly brown (colorless)? I’ll bet most of the time it’s 80% or more brown food with maybe a little dab of salad to color things up (salad covered with brown salad dressing). Try and reverse the ratio so that 80% of the plate has color. The best color is green. Think spinach, kale, chard, broccoli, beet geens, collards, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, avocado, and (other than iceberg) lettuce. Then add some red with beets and tomatoes, and some orange with squash and yams. Color is good. Fear no color when it comes to food. Avoid the brown meal, the fried and battered, the gravied and sauced. I believe it was Muhammad Ali back when he was Cassius Clay who said, “If you’re eatin’ brown, you’re goin’ down.”