Introducing “Eat like it’s 1899”

Paul von Zielbauer — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:36:05 GMT

Nutritional strength comes in many forms. The biggest one being the food we put into our bodies. Not that long ago, I stopped my habit of eating the same, ultra-processed meals I grew up eating in the Midwest in the 1970s and 80s and, even worse, the habit of feeding them to my daughter. I hated the idea that I was training her to consume industrialized deathfood1, intentionally tweaked by multinational corporations to be as addictive as possible.

My nutrition-education journey

So about two years ago, I started a nutrition-education journey. I taught myself to:

read and (harshly) judge food labels, ingredients lists and serving sizes
understand the tyranny of added sugars and the differences between saturated fats and unsaturated fats and between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol
translate ounces typically shown on food packaging into grams of protein that the nutrition experts always tell us to eat enough of
learn all the ways Big Food is legally allowed to intentionally mislead you and me about what’s in the ultra-processed garbage it claims is healthy or nutritious
avoid packaged foods infused with chemicals that keep them from every going bad and that would never be found in a regular kitchen

A lot to learn, after 57 years of eating whatever seemed healthy enough according to General Mills Inc., Kraft Heinz Co., Conagra Brands Inc., and The Campbell’s Co. I learned that ultra-processed foods (UPFs) account for more than three-quarters of these companies’ U.S. retail sales, according to one recent industry research report2.

So I started cooking healthy daily meals for us that were packed with protein, nutrients and whole foods from a variety of food groups.

That’s how Eat like it’s 1899 began in concept: from a desire to become a highly informed and consistently healthy food consumer.

I now prepare simple, healthy meals every day—or close to it— and have gained a lot of knowledge about choosing food groups, creating better eating habits, adding new nutrition sources to my and my daughter’s diet and eliminating other foods that aren’t serving our purposes.

What is this thing you’re calling "Eat like it’s 1899”?

Eat like it’s 1899 is my new weekly, 7-minute cooking and food demo, recorded in my working-dad’s kitchen, that shows how to make one healthy, tasty meal at a time, in under 20 minutes, from healthy whole foods that aren’t expensive or hard to find.

I don’t use fancy cooking techniques or equipment—one pan, one pot, a sharp knife and a few spices and oils, not much else. I am not a trained chef, nutritionist or foodie. I’m a curious, self-taught older dad on a budget who taught himself how to have some fun making nutritious dinners for his kid. Why? Because I want to be able to build durable, lean muscle now so that I can walk fast and play tennis with my daughter when I’m 80.

Every Friday, you’ll get a new Eat like it’s 1899 video with a healthy meal you can easily replicate at home. You’ll also get my insights on food buying, label reading and meal-prep and -cooking shortcuts that have been taste-tested by my daughter, who does not suffer crappy meals lightly.

Paid AGING with STRENGTH subscribers, as always, get valuable extras. Including downloadable recipe cards for every meal, a free health & wellness coaching session (I’m a Mayo Clinic-trained health/wellness coach); and access to Ask Me Anything and Q&A sessions.

Transcript of the video

Hey everybody, I’m Paul von Zielbauer from AGING with STRENGTH, and this is Eat Like It’s 1899. It’s a new video series I’m doing for the channel that’s going to bring video into my kitchen—a working dad, single-dad kitchen—to show you how I have changed my Midwestern eating habits about two years ago from eating a bunch of crap, ie, mostly processed food, to eating almost no processed food, and how that's changed not only how I feel and my health but, really, how I cook in the kitchen for me and my daughter.

What to expect every Eat like it’s 1899 video

And so this series is all about making healthy meals from whole foods that eliminate ultra-processed ultra-processed deathfood, as I call it, from the industrial food companies, and be able to make healthy meals in 15-20 minutes, not in an hour and a half with all precious little ingredients that you can only get at a farmers market. That’s not what this is.

Healthy meals from whole foods
No ultra-processed deathfood
Done in 15-20 minutes
Regular, store-bought ingredients
Tasty & fun to eat!

Each segment will be a basic recipe that you can make for lunch or dinner in 15 or 20 minutes with affordable grocery bought Healthy whole foods that taste good. It’s got to taste good. There’s three or four things that I think every kitchen needs, not fancy kitchen, but just a working kitchen like mine to cook repeatable, healthy, tasty food day in and day out.

The 3 kitchen essentials

The first thing is just spending a little bit of money on getting a decent pan. The other essential thing is a really good knife. I spent About $200 on this particular knife. The other thing that is really important is the proper amount of oils and spices just to make sure that you’re eating healthy but also seasoning your food in a way that makes you happy.

What I do is keep a couple of essential oils on hand. I cook with a lot of avocado oil because it has a higher smoke point than extra virgin olive oil, which is an essential part of a Mediterranean diet that I’ve followed.

The other just basic essential is spices: salt, onion salt with not a lot of chemicals in it, garlic powder, definitely some fresh crushed pepper. Smoked paprika and tarragon. One other sauce is tamari. It’s a brewed sauce, similar in taste to soy sauce, but it’s, I think, much more refined and it really adds just sort of a, more of a hint than a punch in the face kind of flavor.

But really, salt, pepper, a few seasonings, dill weed, oregano, and then on the windowsill I have basil and things that I’ll put.

I also use a lot of chopped cilantro or parsley just to sort of give the dish a little bit of an aesthetic when I serve it to my kid who actually appreciates it. So that’s the essentials.

I hope you’ll join me for Eat Like It’s 1899, starting next week!

We can argue about whether that’s too harsh a term for what Big Food purposely sells to a public that, since 1960, has grown exponentially more obese, hypertensive, type-2 diabetic, heart unhealthy and, not coincidentally, addicted to ultra-processed foods containing chemicals specifically to hook children. Or we could just go with deathfood.

https://www.foodbusinessnews.net/articles/30598-the-companies-most-exposed-to-consumer-upf-concerns