Food for Thought - Simple Foods

It seems to me the idea of eating simple and unrefined foods are not new to us. The prolific Amereican writer, John Steinbeck, had already told us in his 1935 book Tortilla Flat that simple foods are good for us:

Among the many residents in a seaside community, Tortilla Flat, there was a single mom with eight children. In good years when bean crops were aplenty, Senoria Teresina fed her growing family with tortillas and the leftover beans that she and her mother salvaged from the field. But when the time was bad, leftover pulses were in short supply. To feed her hungry kids, the hard-pressed mom accepted charities from her equally destitute neighbors. But the fine and delicate foods such as cured meat, fish, cheeses, sugars, white flour, and even the fresh greens, the kind hearted residents of the neighborhood flop house pilfered from the local grocers never did any good to her children. These refined foods made them sick. However, once the children were put back on their old diet of beans and tortilla breads, all of their ailments disappeared. - Ayee