Patter Matters — whole food

The nutrition label is one of the most information-dense objects in everyday life — and one of the most misread. Most people look at two or three numbers: calories, maybe protein, maybe sugar. They make a judgment. They move on. The result is that the most important information on the package — the ingredient list — goes largely unexamined. Start With the Ingredient List, Not the Nutrition Facts This is the single most useful habit change in food shopping. The Nutrition Facts panel tells you what is in a product quantitatively. It does not tell you what the product is...

Alice Waters has been making this argument for decades. Eat what grows near you. Eat what grows now. Pay attention to the season — to what is ripe, what is abundant, what the land is producing at this particular moment. The argument was radical when she started making it in the 1970s. Today it is absorbed into a certain kind of food culture — farmers markets, CSAs, restaurant menus that change with the harvest. And yet most of what most Americans eat has no relationship to season at all. What Seasonal Eating Actually Means Seasonal eating does not require a...

Every ingredient in a Patterbar comes from somewhere specific. This is not true of most packaged food. Most packaged food is made from commodities — interchangeable inputs purchased from whoever offers the best price at the time of procurement. The wheat in a cracker might come from one of a dozen suppliers depending on the quarter. The "dried cherries" in a bar might be sourced differently every year based on availability and cost. This approach is efficient. It is also why most packaged food tastes the way it does. The Culinary Standard Patter has approached ingredient sourcing the way a...

There is a question worth sitting with. At some point in the last century, the American relationship with food changed fundamentally. Not in the way food culture usually discusses — not in terms of trends or cuisines or dining habits — but in something more basic. The thing most Americans eat most of the time stopped being food in any meaningful sense of the word, and we largely didn't notice. The Transition For most of human history, food was what it was: animals, plants, and the things made from them through cooking. The tools of transformation were heat, salt, fermentation,...