Consider Frito - Washington Examiner

It’s important, as nutritionists and health experts will tell you, to eat more simply. Try to eat locally sourced foods, follow the advice, and choose minimally processed foods. The fewer ingredients the better, experts will say, so check the ingredients list on every box, bag or frozen food package you buy.

That’s tired, bossy advice, I know, and it always seems like someone suggests that the key to overall health is to hunker down every day and eat your front lawn, bugs and all. That’s the end of all this nutritional advice, I admit, but we live in extreme times. You know how it goes: first they offer some sensible advice about a healthy diet, and before you know it, they’re turning crickets into some kind of burger and telling you to eat it and enjoy it.

(Illustration by Tatiana Lozano/Washington Examiner; Getty Images)

This is what happened to all those wonderful light bulbs we used to have – the ones that turned incandescent and glowed a flattering pink-orange color – and now we have to live under the cold gray and sickly cloak of those horrible LED lights that last forever. I would rather take a few years off the life of the planet to get my warm glow back, and I make no apologies for my selfish preference to subject future generations to an arid, waterless future if we can keep using toilets that, you know, actually release.

We all have that annoying friend – some of us, inexplicably, have more than one – who can recite the facts and figures that describe our personal and planetary decline. The complicated, overly chemical food we eat is killing us. Our unrestrained use of Earth’s resources will heat the planet and burn us. Advanced stage capitalism is eliminating indigenous peoples and their ancestral wisdom from our world. Again: you know how it is.

The best way to get out of these irritating discussions, I recently discovered, is to listen to everything, take a long, thoughtful pause, and then ask, “Let me ask you something: Have you ever really thought about Frito? What I mean to say, really considered this? And then, when they are momentarily stunned by this unexpected right hook, I hit them with some knowledge.

I’ll start like this: eating a bag (or two, or seven) of Fritos is nothing less than a celebration of the indigenous eating habits of greater America (North, Central, and South) peoples and cultures. Corn, as everyone knows, was taken back to European settler-colonialists by the greatest settler-colonialist of all, Christopher Columbus. With each delicious crunch, we recover the heritage of our continental ancestors and the Corn Mother, Mother of More.

OK, I made that last part up. But it wasn’t me who invented it: the three ingredients in a bag of original flavored Fritos corn chips are: corn, corn or canola oil and salt.

And that. Just those three things. Not bad, right? If you follow the rule of checking the ingredients, the fried ones will be quite healthy.

Compare, for example, the ingredients of a popular frozen vegan “burger,” which I cut and pasted here for convenience: “Ingredients: Water, carrot, onion, soy protein concentrate, mushrooms, water chestnuts, soy flour, gluten wheat, vegetable oil (corn, canola and/or sunflower), green pepper, isolated soy protein, cooked brown rice (water, brown rice), whole oats, onion powder, red pepper, corn starch. Contains 2% or less sugar, black olives, salt, methylcellulose, konjac flour, soy sauce (fermented soybeans, salt), spices, garlic powder, potassium salt, xanthan gum, jalapeno pepper.”

I choose the healthier Frito, if you don’t mind. On the one hand, I care about my health and the ancient cultures of the Earth’s indigenous people, and on the other, I have no idea what konjac flour is, but I would be surprised if konjac was grown sustainably. For you, for our ancestors, for the planet, Frito is the answer. It’s more than a snack. It’s activism.

Full disclosure: I am not and have never been an employee, shareholder, security holder or financial partner of the Frito-Lay corporation. I’m not making a general case about the company as a whole. What I mean is that a bag of Fritos – specifically the original flavor; I’m not talking about the other stuff – it’s the answer to everything those annoying eat-this-not-that friends are worried about, and when you tell them that, it totally ruins their day. And this also makes a delicious snack.

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Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a writer and executive producer of Healthand he is the co-founder of Ricochet.com.