By Francesca
It’s commonly held wisdom that one healthy choice leads to another. So it seemed fitting that I discovered a health food store on the way home from my new gym.
The store is called Health & Harmony, and as soon as I passed through its doors, I knew I had entered the rabbit hole of rabbit food.
Rows upon rows of products I’d never seen before in brightly colored packaging with words I’d never read.
Chia, and kombucha, and flax, oh my!
I was dazzled. I’ve always been an adventurous eater, but since I started my new and improved diet in the spring, the result has been a rather repetitive rotation of lean meals.
This was like Willy Wonka’s factory with no high-fructose corn syrup.
When I call this a health food store, I don’t mean a box of Kashi cereal. Kashi is for amateurs. This was some next-level, Goop.com kind of stuff.
The dairy aisle, for example, isn’t hemmed in by the confines of a cow. There’s almond milk, coconut milk, soy milk, Tofutti cream cheese, anything but milk from a mammal.
Think outside the teat.
And forget that Greek yogurt that John Stamos sells. Health & Harmony is immune to Uncle Jesse’s charms. Here, they sell Siggi’s Icelandic-style Skyr.
Don’t be scared, or skyrred. Skyr is just Icelandic for yogurt.
And it’s delicious. They have the most unusual flavors, like Coconut, Orange & Ginger, and Pumpkin Spice, so of course I had to try them all.
Gluten is enemy number one at this store. Every pretzel, cracker, and cookie says GLUTEN FREE across the front. Even things that obviously wouldn’t have gluten, like cheese, peanut butter, or edamame, proudly display their gluten prejudice.
But what if I want gluten? Or not so much that I want it, but I’m afraid of what they’re substituting it with.
Remember when we all hopped on the nonfat bandwagon before we realized that meant replacing fat with enough sugar to send you into glycemic shock?
Or when we fell for sugar-free without realizing that meant carcinogenic-aspartame-full?
Better the devil you know …
So I stick with the unusual but still pure foods. Most of the time. I confess, I was intrigued by a bag of white noodles floating in water called Shirataki noodles. They look like spaghetti, but they are mysteriously calorie-free.
My foggy memory of chemistry class says that a calorie is a unit of heat energy, so if this food has no calories, does that mean you can’t kill it with fire?
It is the devil’s noodle.
But carb-free pasta, are you kidding? Mephistopheles, where do I sign?
(Holy sh-t, guys, I just Wikipedia’d Shirataki noodles, because I am a serious author who does serious research, and it, for real, said that another name is “Devil’s Tongue Noodles.” I was just joking before! Now I’m scared.)
The Devil’s Noodle
Also, it seems every food at this store has live active cultures in it. Apparently, bacteria in your food is a good thing.
I knew the five-second rule was real.
For instance, there’s an entire section of sauerkrauts, because pickled is in this season. On a whim, I plucked the Spicy Wakame Ginger Kimchi off the shelf. The back of the bag had a list of rhetorical questions:
“Do you know that raw, fermented foods are alive?”
No, I thought I was eating vegetarian.
“Fresh kraut is full of living, healthful micro-organisms that need room to grow.”
Do I need to save for their college?
“The nifty valve at the top of this pouch allows the Kraut to breathe.”
Concerning.
But I bought the wacky ginger kimchi anyway, and you know what? Those living, breathing organisms taste great with mayonnaise!
Well, a store clerk convinced me to switch to Vegenaise (diary-free, egg-free, GLUTEN-free), but it tastes the same, almost.
When I cracked down on my diet, I pretty much eliminated all my favorite snacks. I was rarely consuming them for nutritional value and mostly eating them to solve problems such as: “I’m bored,” “I have to work to earn money,” “This isn’t that good an episode,” and “Why isn’t he texting me back?”
But Health & Harmony sells all manner of guilt-free snacks. My favorite are the Cassava Root Chips. They look like potato chips, but they’re made of a tough, fibrous root.
And if I don’t already have you at “tough, fibrous root,” they also have 40 percent less fat than a regular potato chip.
I had never heard of cassava, but I read on the back, “The Cassava tree grows all over Asia, South America, and Africa. Cassava root is the primary energy source for 800 million people all over the planet!”
I paused to consider that 800 million people are forced to have a diet primarily fueled by a tree root. And I don’t think they do it to watch their figure.
But, if you don’t mind the side of privilege-awareness, this is a great snack.
And the bag said the chips are Certified Rain Forest Alliance. So at least I wasn’t ripping cassava root out of the hands of indigenous peoples.
Speaking of certifications, all the store’s products appear very well educated. I realized this with the only snack I tried and hated, the Kale + Chia Chips. I generally love kale, and I don’t really understand what chia is, but combined, they tasted like tortilla chips made of peat moss. However, I couldn’t knock its pedigree:
Certified Kosher, Certified Gluten Free, Certified Vegan, and Certified MSG and Trans-fat Free.
The chips have more meaningless degrees than James Franco.
But perhaps my favorite food discovered at Health & Harmony is Peace Cereal, specifically in the Baobab Coconut flavor.
What is a baobab, you ask? I’d only previously encountered the word in The Little Prince, but I remember when studying that book in French class, the baobab trees are a) parasitic “bad seeds” that will destroy planets with their roots, and b) possibly an allegory for the Nazis.
But they also taste amazing with coconut!
What do they taste like? Between you and me, I would say the flakes taste like a Joy sugar cone.
But don’t tell the clerk I said so.
All I know for sure is that I can go through a box a week.
Before, I had completely cut out cereals because I thought they had too much sugar, but this is a cereal I can feel good about! It says right on the box:
“A contribution will be made to non-profit causes for every Peace cereal product sold.”
Eager to justify eating fistfuls of cereal in front of a Say Yes to the Dress marathon, I went to the website for more details.
I think I was the first person to do so, since the charities on their site haven’t been updated since 2012. But they support national parks, breast and ovarian cancer research, and a New Hampshire animal rescue devoted to disabled animals.
Do you want to tell Misty, the one-eyed, arthritic Labrador, that you can’t help her find her food bowl, because you’re cutting carbs?
I didn’t either.
So every time I came home from the gym, I’d stop at Health & Harmony and pick up new, unusual foods to try, feeling like a pirate sailing home with exotic treasure.
But you know what happened? All that booty went right to my ass.
I realized my health food store is making me fat.
That’s what happens if you sell your soul for a diet.