Reflections on October Unprocessed

October is over, and so is my quest to eat Unprocessed for an entire month. My quest, it was unsuccessful. Eating an entirely unprocessed diet is so much harder than I expected. I talked about some of these challenges earlier in the month: take out, snacks in the office kitchen, basic kitchen staples like chicken stock and chocolate. And these challenges didn’t get easier. We are surrounded by processed food, in places we might not even consider. And I wasn’t being as strict as some of my fellow Challenge Participants.

The hardest part was simply paying attention. Remembering. Being aware, and thoughtful. It is so easy to move through life without attention, focusing on work and relationships and family and even play, and taking in meals as mere sustenance, without care. It is so easy to put food in our bodies because we’re busy and stressed, without thinking about that food in a greater context, and not just the context of our own diets, but in the context of our communities, of the planet, of all those other things that are, inextricably, connected to what we eat. Eating well, in ways that are healthful for our bodies and our environment, requires planning and care, energy and time. And sometimes, these are the things we feel we do not have to spare.

I’m trying not to think of my October challenge as a failure, but as a starting point. Despite the many moments I slipped into thoughtless patterns of shopping, cooking, and eating, this experiment made me more aware. It’s experiments like this, and like the juice cleanse I did in September, and like reading and re-reading Michael Pollan or Eric Schlosser, that bring me back to awareness, and help me learn things about the kind of cook and eater I want to be. Changing habits doesn’t happen overnight, or even in one month. Real, life long change happens incrementally, and sometimes over and over again.

So, for me, October Unprocessed isn’t really over. The challenge to eat a diet that is sustainable, not just for the planet but for myself, is one that lasts far longer than a month. I won’t always succeed, but if I continue to try, it’s really impossible to fail.