Clean Eating: What Do I Do with the Processed Foods?

Some of you may have read my blog Clean Eating: What Is It? When I wrote that blog a little over a year ago, I was just beginning my clean eating transition, now my diet is about 10/90 10 percent processed and 90 percent clean. I still find myself buying canned chickpeas, broths, pasta sauce…things like that. But I am slowly but surely phasing those out as well, I actually don’t buy them all the time, when I plan correctly, I purchase the necessary ingredients to make even those items from scratch.

When you are making the transition to clean eating you have a few choices on how you want to approach it. For some they want to take it slow and just replace a few items as the go along, others keep their processed food until they are all gone and replace them with “clean” foods as they run out of the processed versions, then you have those that start off going 50/50 or 25/75; 25 percent processed and 75 percent clean and of course you have those that go full throttle, they toss out everything that is processed and re-stock with all clean foods.

For the latter group of people there’s always that question “what do I do with my processed food?” This question is a difficult one for some people because they don’t know if they should donate it or just throw it out; they ask themselves “if this food is not good enough for me and my family, then how can it be good enough for someone else?” For me the answer is simple, even though I transitioned my processed foods out of my house and used them up before replacing them with “clean” foods, there is still no question in my mind that I would rather donate that food to a family/someone in need before I would ever throw it in the garbage. I’ve always had this thing against throwing stuff away when I think someone else can benefit from it, especially clothes and food. I am the person that will fill up HUGE bags with unwanted clothing, wash everything that needs to be washed and drive right on down to the Goodwill and drop it off. So when it comes to food I’m no different, I would never choose my own beliefs over letting someone go hungry. Just because I believe in eating a certain way does not mean I want others who can’t afford to do so to go hungry.

That being said, my suggestion is donate all unwanted food to any place that accepts food for the hungry, especially during this time of year, there are places everywhere that is collecting food for the holidays.

And…It Is What It Is!