In the last few years, I have noticed that many of us want to know more about the content of prepared, fresh food we buy in restaurants, grocery stores and bakeries. This is a new phenomenon—nobody ever used to ask the chef how many calories were in the cream sauce.

In fact, some people might say questions like that ruin the experience. But, we’ve become accustomed to nutritional labels on packaged foods, and it seems reasonable that we would want the same information about the fresh food we’re buying—not just the ingredients, but the chemical analysis of calorie content, fat, carbohydrates, and protein.

What is this about? The simplest part of the story is that many of us are better educated about ingredients and we want to avoid the harmful ones and eat the healthy ones. We also have a desire to measure what we’re eating so we want to know about the component parts of our food. The path to health and weight control that I most often hear about is a reductive one: decrease calories, decrease grams of fat, eat foods with a low glycemic index. It’s reductive in that it focuses on component parts of food rather than the whole food or the entire experience of eating and it usually focuses on eating less of these components. To accomplish this we need to know what we’re eating and since so much of what we eat is made by others we have to ask for the analysis.

This approach to food gives us interesting information but I think it misses the larger issues in our culture of eating that may have just as important a role in our health. By culture of eating I mean…whom we eat with, how long we take to eat, do we have real meals regularly, do we know about our food. To the end of improving our health, I’ve daydreamed about creating “Nourishment Labels” rather than nutritional labels. These labels can include all of the nutritional info we’d like but they could also include the parts of eating that may have an equally large impact on our health and the health of our community:

• Is this food made from naturally occurring ingredients? • Did you or a family member make this food? • Did you eat this food with friends and loved ones? • Was the food made in a way that is sustainable for our environment and for the food producers? • Do you know the history of the food you’re eating? • Does the food taste good? Does it smell good? Do you feel satisfied after eating it?

The more “ yes” responses to these questions, the potentially more nourishing the food will be and the healthier we will be. Perhaps we might want to consider addressing these larger social issues of eating along with the chemical analyses.