The Incredibly Simple Secret to Eating Healthy Food

If eating healthy food is important to you, there's a simple way to accomplish this. Generally, simple food is healthy food. Items that don't have a long list of ingredients, nor a label to put that ingredient list on, are generally healthier. Lettuce doesn't have a label that says "lettuce". There's no need for an ingredient label. While I was researching the cuisine in France, I found this principle in place everywhere I went.

Then, if you take direction from France cuisine, you can really assure you're eating healthy food by practicing "terroir" (tare - waa). Terroir is a French term that literally means "earth", but has come to denote all things that are produced locally to where you live. As it was explained to me, terroir is "the sun, the soil, and the love of the farmer".

Pascale Mierve, owner of L' Epicerie Fine, and multi-generational grocery and spice dealer explains terroir in such an elegant way. "You have to respect the seasons," he tells me. "You should not eat a tomato in December, you eat potatoes in December."

What France cuisine has taught me, and Pascal is verifying, is that eating healthy foods means eating not only what is grown or produced locally, but what is produced seasonally also.

The most nutritious, most flavorful items are the simple foods, those that come from within a few miles of your home and don't have an ingredient label. Eating healthy food shouldn't be the secret it is because if you eat local and seasonal, you'll always be eating healthy. I hope that you will take the lessons that I've learned from studying France cuisine and begin eating simpler, fresher ingredients from your local farmer too.