“Happy shopping”, how to best shop while protecting yourself from the pitfalls of labels

An ancient proverb says that "you never get old at the table" and food certainly remains one of life's pleasures today. But how much do we really care and know about what we eat? Caught up in the frenzy of modern life, we dedicate less and less time and attention to choosing food. We delegate the preparation of our meals, being satisfied with "finished" foods, ready to use in bags and trays, to be put immediately under our teeth or at most in the microwave.

Let's think about it: our grandparents, to prepare a nice sauce, went to the garden or at most to the market to get tomatoes. They always had a precise idea of what they ate. Today, in our "run run", we immediately aim for a nice ready sauce. Too bad that it has around ten ingredients on the label versus the three or four usually present in home-made sauce. Never mind that among the entries there are obscure colourants, preservatives, additives and more or less natural flavourings. Want to put comfort!

Let's face it, consciously purchasing the products destined to end up on our plates today is not a given. However, " Happy Shopping " (Sperling & Kupfer, 2023, pp. 272, also e-book) comes to our aid, an agile handbook on purchasing food written by the agronomist Daniele Paci.

Aware of the fact that before recipes, chefs and tastings, there is a healthy diet and intelligent shopping, Paci leads us by the hand to choose the best products, best suited to our needs and most natural, learning to read the labels and the list of ingredients, to recognize the less good additives and to save without sacrificing quality.

Happy Shopping, in fact, is a really simple manual to consult . Divided into five large categories - basic foods, fruit and vegetables, preserves, oils and fats, cured meats and dairy products - it dedicates a detailed sheet to each of the foods we most often put in the cart.

Each card is easy to interpret and read . Paci, starting from his choice, i.e. how to recognize the food with the best qualities, tells us the details of the foods, adds curiosity and analyzes clichés, gives advice on good preservation and debunks false myths. For example, did you know that salt and bicarbonate of soda are not needed when soaking legumes? Or that black olives are almost always a "fake food"? And again: have you ever wondered if all types of salt are the same or is it better to choose a particular one to add to our foods?

Furthermore, Paci invites us not to overlook an essential fact: it is better to focus on fresh ingredients and raw materials to be cooked at home, simply . Industrial foods are necessarily subjected to a thousand treatments which certainly make them hygienic, bordering on sterility, but which contribute to impoverishing them from a nutritional and flavor point of view. Ergo they nourish little, they don't fill you up and they need to be "revitalized", adding colorings, additives and aromas that please the eye, the palate and the sense of smell. The final result is a very colorful and fragrant product, in which there is often too much fat and salt. So: pay attention to the food label . You must read it carefully, remembering that the ingredients are always arranged in order of quantity . If the first item on a chocolate bar is sugar and not cocoa, it's best to leave it alone.

So let's use this useful tool carefully to find out what we eat, choosing healthy ingredients : olive or sunflower seed oil and not palm vegetable oils or low-quality hydrogenated fats. Even in this field, simplicity is art: the fewer ingredients there are, the fewer passages the food will undergo before reaching the table. It will be healthier because it is more similar to how we would have prepared it: according to Daniele Paci.