"Healthy Eating Shouldn't Be a Privilege"

Actress and entrepreneur Zooey Deschanel on making healthy choices and fighting "food deserts"

- By Zooey Deschanel

When I was growing up, I had lots of access to healthy food. My parents were both foodies and very good cooks. My mom was always baking homemade bread; she's an incredible maker of sourdough. My dad is half French and had a great appreciation for food and fresh ingredients.

I've always eaten pretty well. For a while I was vegan for ethical reasons, but for me it was just too hard to maintain. Now I'm a pescatarian-I like to be able to eat in most restaurants and find this is a great, sustainable diet that's versatile and it's easy to order off many menus.

During my first pregnancy I tried to be extra healthy. I didn't have any strange cravings, other than lemonade, which I don't normally drink. I tried to eat mostly a whole food, organic diet, since it seemed like a pretty safe choice for my health and that of the baby.

While I was really aware of what I was eating and where it came from, I found it hard to find real information about my food. I would look at the packet, which was marketed as "healthy," but found it difficult to determine what was actually in this product.

A lot of the time I would look up an ingredient and find that it was code for something else; what I thought I was buying wasn't always what I was getting.

Sometimes I would see an ingredient and think: "Is that a chemical? Is that a natural ingredient?" It felt like I needed a degree in reading ingredients to go to the grocery store and make a healthy choice.

Whenever I went to restaurants I would ask where the food came from and they would say, "Um, a truck." Nobody seemed to have real answers as to what I was eating.