If you can't name it, why are you eating it?
One test for a real food
Pick a thing off the shelf. Tap every ingredient you can actually name and picture. Watch the label shrink to the few things that were ever food.
Ingredients
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These are real, representative supermarket ingredient lists. Tap an ingredient to mark it as one you can name; tap again to undo.
Not calories. Not organic. Not a health claim on the front, which is marketing, not food.
Every ingredient should be a thing you can name and picture.
Oats. Salt. Tomatoes. An egg. If a line on the back needs a chemistry degree or a search engine, it wasn't put there for you. It was put there for the machine, or the shelf life, or the mouthfeel that keeps you eating past full.
A long ingredient list isn't automatically poison. But it is almost always a tell: the more names on the label you don't recognize, the further the thing in your hand has drifted from being food and the closer it has come to being a product: engineered, in a lab, to survive a warehouse and win a taste test.
The four or five things you could name are usually the only things your grandmother would have called food. The rest is the difference between a kitchen and a factory.
“Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.”Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food. This page is a tribute to that one rule, made tappable.