Clean Plates helps reduce your anxiety that the menu might be terrible for your body and the environment
Clean Plates is a guide and company started by Jared Koch to help you lower the anxiety that menu in front of you is unhealthy, unsustainable, or generally bad. Jared Koch created company which “curates the market place, products, advice… what’s real practical changes for people to find better restaurants, products, and recipes that are also healthy and sustainable.” The book is “part restaurant guide, part… my rant about nutrition.” Titled Clean Plates New York City 2016: A Guide to the Healthiest, Tastiest, and most Sustainable Restaurants, Koch is trying to retrain our brains from the fad-diet, processed foods, and “healthy” foods that we have grown up pummeled by incessantly.
We’re all different, just as some people are lactose in tolerant– not all foods are as good for all people. He recognizes these difference in terms of peoples’ individual microbiomes. But, since he cannot individually guide us to the perfect menus for our bodies, he can advise people on food that is generally best for the most people.
The five aspects of this that he mentions in the book are:
- Bio-individuality: There is more than one right way to eat.
- Quality over Quantity: Eat natural, high quality, whole foods.
- Plant-Based Foods: This doesn’t mean he vouches for exclusively vegetarian or vegan diet. He wants people to focus on, “high quality, real foods, plant based foods, as your main part of your diet.”
- Eat Meat Responsibility: “If you eat meat, do free grazed, pasture raised, grass-fed, no antibiotics. Be a smarter animal eater, if you will.”
- Choose Better Foods: “This is about other categories of food, choosing wisely. Reducing sugars, reducing poor quality oils. This section gets into beverages and caffeine.”
Q: What was the process?
A: We brought on a food writer with a lot of experience. Literally within three months we ate at 125 restaurants. Basically compiled a list of all possible restaurants– trust your instinct. We find all possible places that might meet our criteria, fact check incessantly. We asked questions every time we dined, were very annoying. Then we got a Fact Check form; turned it in to a whole proprietary survey over time. If they can’t name vendors, you need to get proof from receipts. It’s hard to be 100% fail safe. The same way that USDA Organic Certified foods are disproved– we may have been duped before. But we do our best.
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This is a great resource to use if you want to follow these ideals when you eat. Good for your body, good for your soul, good for the environment– and above all– still tastes good!