When Did We Stop Seeing Our Food?

My husband is the one who actually cooks in our house.

I handle the cleanup, which I've made peace with. But a few weeks ago in the Berkshires, I picked a cookbook up off my mother-in-law's kitchen table and fell into it for an hour, and now I'm the one reorganizing the shelves he'll actually use. He's skeptical. So am I, a little.

The book is At Home in the Whole Food Kitchen by Amy Chaplin. It opens not with a recipe but with her pantry. Rows of glass jars — every shape and size — holding grains and seeds and beans and spices. She walks you through them. The history of this spice, the story of that grain. I sat there in a kind of trance.

Then real life spoke up. I have never once had the time to cook like that. One home-cooked meal a day is a good day. In my twenties it was closer to none.

But something lit up in me. And it connected directly to something I learned during five years at Coca-Cola — visiting over a hundred of their factories around the world — about how food actually gets made, and how it gets sold, and why those are two very different things.

The Glass Jar Does Something

Decanting food into clear glass does something immediate. You see it. The actual grain, the actual color, the actual substance, with no label in the way.

Once I started noticing that, I couldn't stop. I walked around the grocery store half-playing a game with myself.

Produce — you see all of it. Tortilla chips — you can see through the bag. Some peanut butters — clear jar, you can see the texture and color. And then rows and rows of things you cannot see at all. Completely wrapped in a label. The food hidden behind a picture of the food.

Here's what I didn't expect to remember from my Coca-Cola years: it didn't used to be this way.

Coke bottles were clear on purpose. Heinz sold ketchup in clear glass on purpose. They wanted you to see the color, the quality, the realness of what was inside. The transparency was the marketing pitch.

Somewhere along the way, that flipped.

When the Package Stopped Being a Window

The printed carton showed up in the 1870s. Then supermarkets replaced the corner grocer, where a clerk used to hand you your goods. Once you were the one picking things off a shelf, the package had a new job: not to show you the food, but to sell it to you.

The package became a billboard.

This happened gradually, not overnight. But the direction of travel is clear when you look at it. What we lost was a default expectation of transparency — the assumption that food should be visible, that you should be able to see what you're buying before you decide to buy it.

Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer who died this week at 90, spent sixty years arguing something adjacent to this. He never owned a computer. He wrote more than 50 books — essays, poems, novels — from a farm his family had worked for generations.

His most famous line is "Eating is an agricultural act."

What he meant is that food starts in soil, with someone growing it, and when we forget that, we become what he called passive consumers — buying what we've been persuaded to want, no longer asking where it came from or what's in it.

He wrote that decades ago, before any of this got as big as it is now. He saw it coming.

The Trade-Offs Nobody Talks About Honestly

I'm not here to tell you Coke is bad for you, or that the food industry is purely villainous, because that's not what five years at Coca-Cola actually taught me.

What I came away with is a real respect for the complexity. And a real skepticism of anyone who flattens it.

Making food at scale means making constant trade-offs. Organic and sustainable, for instance, are not the same thing — they often pull against each other. Something can be beautifully organic and deeply unsustainable at volume. Something else can be truly sustainable and unable to be fully organic. Clean, natural, local, cheap, available to millions — you cannot maximize all of those at once.

Somebody is always choosing which ones to trade.

That's what visiting 100-plus factories taught me. There are two real sides to hold at once: the instinct toward food that's close to its original form is right, and feeding a lot of people affordably is actually hard. The companies that solved the second problem did something impressive, even when the result is a product we're right to be skeptical of.

Holding both of those in your head at once — the respect and the skepticism — is harder than picking a side. But it's more honest.

How Our Grandparents Actually Ate

This is where my brain went, sitting with Amy Chaplin's pantry.

Our grandparents mostly ate whole foods, not because they were virtuous, but because that was what existed. They bought the actual ingredient: the produce, the grain, the cut of meat. They turned it into dinner at home. There was no five-minute rice, no aisle of quick meals.

Their pantry was smaller because the store was smaller. There used to be hundreds of CPG brands. Now there are millions.

And they didn't necessarily eat healthier in the clinical sense. Mine cooked with plenty of butter and cream, smoked, drank. They didn't have better discipline. They had fewer choices.

That explosion of processed choice is more recent than most people realize. And with it came the packaging that sells instead of shows.

What Seeing Your Food Actually Changes

I've been thinking about why the glass jar matters to me beyond aesthetics.

Part of it is attention. When the food is visible, you think about it differently. You reach for the lentils and you see lentils — their actual color, their actual texture. You're more likely to use them. You're more likely to cook them properly because you've already registered what they are.

Part of it is a check on what you actually have. Opaque packaging hides the pantry from itself. You buy things twice because you can't see what's already there. You lose track of what's running low.

But the bigger part is something Wendell Berry named better than I can: paying attention to your food again. The glass jar forces a moment of registration. This is a real thing. I know what it is. I chose it.

That's a different relationship with food than reaching for something wrapped in a label that sells you on the dream of what's inside.

What This Means in Practice

I'm not about to become Amy Chaplin. I won't be cooking three whole-food meals a day. One is a good day.

But what I'm doing this month, before my husband and I both go back to full-time work after parental leave, is simpler: I'm buying jars, and I'm reorganizing the pantry to show me what we actually have.

The goal isn't perfection. The goal is visibility. Seeing the actual grains, the actual oils, the actual things we're putting into our bodies, without a billboard in the way.

That habit of seeing extends beyond the pantry too. It's the same instinct that drives reading ingredient labels on supplements — knowing what's actually in the best vitamin c supplements you're taking, what's in the best omega-3 supplements, and checking that the best collagen supplements you bought contain what the label says they do. The same skepticism that makes clean water brands worth knowing about.

It starts with being able to see the food.

And it starts, for me, with glass jars on a shelf.

The Questions Worth Asking at the Store

Before the practical takeaways, a framing shift: the goal isn't to never buy packaged food. It's to buy it consciously.

That means asking a few questions at the shelf that most of us have stopped asking.

Can I see what's inside? If not, why not — and does that matter for this product?

How many ingredients are listed? A short list isn't automatically better, but a very long one usually signals processing that moved the food further from its original form.

Do I recognize every ingredient? This one's imperfect — legitimate preservatives have chemical names — but it's a useful gut check.

Where did this come from? Not always answerable from the label, but foods high in sulforaphane like broccoli sprouts are worth knowing about for reasons that have nothing to do with the packaging.

And for supplements specifically: does the label tell me the exact form and dose of what I'm taking? The beef organ supplements category, for instance, varies enormously in what's actually inside the capsule. The label should tell you clearly.

Starting Over With the Pantry

I'll show you what mine looks like — the mess and all — as I go through this month.

I'm not holding up my grandparents' pantry as a model of perfect health. And I'm not asking anyone to cook from scratch every night. But I do think something real got lost when food packaging stopped being a window and became a billboard.

The recovery from that isn't complicated. It starts with being able to look at what you're eating before you eat it.

Glass jars. A reorganized shelf. The grain, visible.

That's the whole thing. And if you want to understand why some of those visible ingredients — the sulforaphane in your broccoli sprouts, the electrolytes in whole food sources — matter as much as the supplements you're taking, that reporting is worth reading too.

For readers who want to go deeper into what The Ritualist is covering this month on nutrition, food transparency, and the industry behind what we eat — that's where the fuller reporting lives.

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