Maturity and pasta

October 2, 2015 by Joshua
in Fitness, Nature, Stories, Visualization

I used to think of pasta and rice as staples—that is, the basic food of a meal to put everything else around. Over the years I’ve decreased the pasta, rice, and other staples in favor of vegetables. Now that I see restaurants’ goals less to healthily nourish you and more to entertain your mouth and eyes, I see so-called staples as ways to increase their profit at the expense of your health. I want more vegetables and they want to give me less.

Here is a visual tour of my view of how we mature, in pasta.

Like many, I liked Spaghettios as a kid. Sweet and hardly any substance. More marketing gimmick than food, I’d say.

spaghettios

They don’t look that much more appetizing outside the can:

spaghettios

Some kids’ parents give them pasta with ketchup. In fact, the family I lived with in France did that, undermining my understanding that French didn’t like ketchup. If I hadn’t just shown the Spaghettios, I wouldn’t have thought spaghetti and ketchup could be more appetizing than something, but it seems a step up.

spaghetti and ketchup

At some point you graduate to something with less corn syrup, but still mostly just red sauce. This picture looks more appetizing than the jarred stuff I put on pasta through graduate school at least, but it looks close anyway. It’s almost only pasta.

spaghetti tomato sauce

Actually, I take back “until graduate school.” In college I had already started putting vegetables on my pasta. I’d fry them with garlic and onions, then pour the jarred tomato sauce on. That’s more than just a bit of sauce for flavor. This picture doesn’t show tomato sauce, but basing the sauciness on oil seems about the same.

pasta primavera

Owning a home, living in the same place for a while, having people at work depending on me led me to mature my pasta too. My ratio of vegetables to pasta steadily increased over the years.

pasta more vegetables

When I mostly cut out foods where fiber was removed, I moved to almost only vegetables—to the point where I almost had no pasta at all, like so:

pasta lots of vegetables

Now picking up my farm share of vegetables each week, I don’t even get pasta. I haven’t bought any since my experiment not buying food where I had to throw away packaging after. I mostly think about vegetables. I’ve increased how much I eat beans and nuts a lot. I tend to steam them and make soups out of them more than fry them, like this picture shows, because it’s easier.

cooked veggies

And that’s how I represent a person’s maturation in life, through pasta. I like how I eat now a lot more than Spaghettios, which seem more like something a conglomerate does at you more than food. Today’s food tastes better and makes me less fat.

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