| In writing blogs, I try to steer clear of writing weekly fluffy, pointless rants and ramblings that leave the reader yawning, snoring, or better yet, finding the five minute fold-out closet hanger ad on TV more captivating.
But the incident I am going to call “blog-worthy” today has to do with something we ALL do everyday: EAT. And it deserves a couple paragraphs of notice.
I went into the local supermarket the other day looking for a lunch snack. I quickly found myself wandering through the aisles frustrated, and finding nothing that appealed to me. One woman who worked there asked if she could help me find anything, looking at me as if I appeared completely lost or confused (which I probably did appear; either that or simply dumbfounded that me, not generally being a picky eater, could not find a single thing to eat in the midst of isles and isles of "food.")
This being said, I think grocery stores ought to be called “food-imitation outlets.””Grocery” is defined as “items of food” (Merriam Webster), and the majority of what is sold in so called grocery stores appears to be food, but is not actually food. (Keep in mind that just because you eat something doesn’t mean it’s food).
The problem with a lot of the foods in the grocery store is that they are highly processed and homogenous; most of them are made out of the same thing.
Consider “meal replacements,”such as Slim-fast: You have just finished a two-hour workout, and your body is craving all sorts of diverse, wholesome, immune boosting vitamins to replenish and build stronger muscles, bones, and immunity. So you go ahead and chug a low-carb slim-fast, pouring some Maltodextrin (absorbed as easily as glucose), Soybean Lecithin, sucralose, and twenty other ingredients into your stomach. There are about 23 ingredients in a low-carb slimfast ( http://www.slim-fast.com/products/products.aspx) many of which take the form of processed (stripped of most original nutrients) sugars derived from corn and soybeans. Keep in mind that corn and soybeans are not “bad,” in and of themselves, but when the majority of the calories in our diets come from these two items, we are depriving ourselves of the nutrient diversity we need to reach optimum health.
Foods that are highly processed are highly profitable because by being stripped of their nutrients, they are also stripped of their ability to easily spoil. (What living micro-organism would want to go after a food item that has no nutrients to offer? .. maybe not the mold, but set it in front of Western-diet-eaters, and we’ll go for the styrofoam-like bread, rubber-like cheese, and plastic-like crackers!)
When foods are processed for the sake of shelf-life, nutrient diversity is often lost. Bleached white flour and sugar are excellent examples of this. They are easy to digest (easily absorbed and easily converted to fat), calorie-rich, and offer little or no nutrients and fiber (fiber helps your body know when you’re full and when it’s time to stop eating).
As in most arenas of life, diversity is what sustains thriving life; not homogeny. Consuming the homogenous food-products of the industry is powering our current “health care” industry, which plays blind to the fact of food as medicine; Cardiac patients in hospitals are given root - beer floats and Big Macs at their request.
Back to the post-workout snack: Next time, try stir-frying or steaming some kale. Yes, kale. That crinkly coarse garnish you find underneath your slice of deliciously greasy pizza. Kale is packed with Protein, Iron, fiber, vitamins A, B, E, K, and Calcium to name a few. Talk about a super food! And what’s better yet, all those vitamins come in one beautifully leafy green package and work in symbiosis with one another and your body!
When I talk about “food,” and real food, I am referring to edible things you can find naturally occurring. LIVING food: Food that is so fresh it will spoil if you leave it on the counter for a couple days. But it will re-vitalize your body when eaten (before it spoils of course!).
We’re talking WHOLE eggplants, peppers, parsnips, leeks, spinach sweet potatoes... things that haven’t gotten pulverized, mashed, or injected with all sorts of chemical additives. We’re talking beans. Not from a can. Not salted and mashed. Dry beans. That you have to soak in order to cook with. Beans that have their nice little nutrient package intact. We’re talking fresh basil, heirloom prudence purple tomatoes, and tender hokurei turnips.
Isn’t it interesting how our ideas of “healthy,””acceptable,””normal,” and even what we define as food are often subtly and deeply imbedded into our minds by what the industry causes us to habitually become familiar with?
I happen to be fortunate in the sense that I farm for a living, and I grew up playing in the dirt, picking raspberries, hulling beans, and growing my own food and not only knowing where the majority of it comes from, but also understanding how it was made. I am deeply and intimately connected with what goes into my body. After all, it is mainly what keeps me alive every day, and directly affects the way I feel. I may not have the fanciest house on the block being a farmer. But I’ll tell you that if there is ever a food famine and the “King corn” monocultures are wiped out by a disease the pesticides can’t ward off, you’re all invited for supper. I have a basement full of stored, frozen, and/or canned Heirloom squash, beans, homemade salsa, pesto, bread, garlic, and marinara sauce to name a few. All of it from local farms. We’ll cook up a feast and everyone will leave stuffed off of last season’s harvest.
But what if I, like multitudes of people, were living in inner city food deserts, such as Detroit, where there are literally NO grocery stores. I repeat, there are NO grocery stores in Detroit. (source: People’s Grocery, Oakland) in other words your chances of even finding real food to consume are just about non-existent. If you’re lucky you might find a couple conventionally grown bananas next to the check out at 7-11. Other than that your options are the local corner stores and gas stations, dripping with calorie - rich and nutrient void corn dogs, donuts, rubber-like candies, plastic-like “cheese”... etc. the list goes on. In other words, laden with all the corn and soy you could ever want, in the form of saturated fat and high fructose corn syrup: like styrofoam food wrapped in packages screaming “eat me!” ...and designed to make you KEEP eating it once you’ve started.
So what validity do I give to my two page rant about the importance of good food, when I know there are people who simply don’t have the financial means, let alone access to eat well? What about the mass numbers of us who are at the mercy of the government subsidizing corn instead of diverse, fresh produce? After all, I myself am guilty of the occasional supermarket donut indulgence. Although I find that lately, the more I learn about our food system, the more appealing a freshly dug sweet carrot is than the first.
So what to do? It is unrealistic, to say the least, to expect your every single average Joe in middle-class suburbia, or in inner city Detroit, to turn his/her non-existent spare bedroom into a greenhouse, or to convert their few windowsills into hydroponic planters that will fully feed the family year round.
So, what can we actually do to even make a mark on the industry, and demand food where there is currently none? I am convinced (currently), that what we can do, and by all means should do, is what we have been hearing over and over but can’t stress enough: Vote with your dollar. You don’t have to afford the most expensive, fancily-organically labeled, granola-head-wooing fruit and nut bar on the market. It might not be that great for you anyway. Buy the raw ingredients instead, and take fifteen more minutes a day to prepare your food. Buy flour and make your own bread. Eat oats, honey, and fresh fruit for breakfast instead of coco puffs and fruit loops. You’ll start to develop a taste for real food. Find and support a local farmer’s market or join a community supported agriculture program, if there is one around. When you go out to eat next time, may I dare to say, ASK where the beef came from, ASK if it’s hormone free and if the veggies are pesticide-free. Be the active consumer demand. Ask for what you want and don’t buy what you don’t want.
I walked into Good Times a couple weeks ago (I know, I know, *gasp!*), and I asked them if they knew where their beef came from, and surprisingly enough, they did. Good Times gets their beef (at least the Good Times in Fort Collins :) ) from not even thirty miles away, and it is antibiotic free (now as for grass-fed, that is another question). Good food needs to be demanded and reach the masses. They only way that will change is if we demand it, if we vote for it.
Learn where your food comes from. Ask. Choose where you get your food, and what you put into your body.
Food, as Michael Polan says (In Defense of Food), “no longer seems like the smartest place to economize,”when you start to realize how much food you actually aren’t buying when you check out of the grocery store with a heaping cart.
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