Many of you have expressed an interest in food with questions such as: what should I eat, how much, when should I eat, and can what I eat improve my performance in the garage or while racing an event?  For the next couple months, we’ll use Wednesdays (because it is our rest day) to post information to get you thinking about food.  

We’ll start with the basics – identifying real food.

Here’s a short quiz.  For each food listed below, decide whether or not you think it’s a real food.  Post your answers to comments if you like.  We’ll post the answers tomorrow.

1. Broccoli
2. Grapes
3. Ketchup
4. Baked turkey leg
5. LaraBar
6. Sliced roast beef deli meat
7. Chocolate Peanut Butter Zone perfect bar

The following is an excerpt from the summary of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto:

“Food. There’s plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it. So why should anyone need to defend it?

Because most of what we’re consuming today is not food, and how we’re consuming it — in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone — is not really eating. Instead of food, we’re consuming “edible foodlike substances” — no longer the products of nature but of food science. Many of them come packaged with health claims that should be our first clue they are anything but healthy. In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion. The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.”