2/14/10

Food And Convenience.

When it comes to food, the last thing that should come to mind is "convenient". That is a word that should just never, ever be associated with food.
Spend a day in a real, small farm, and watch how hard farmers work to tend to their animals that produce dairy and eggs; the process of killing the animals so we can have our meat, poultry and pork. Or the work in the fields tending to organic produce and fruit. Small farms don't receive government subsidies, and there is no safety net to protect them if they lose crops or animals- subsidies only go to the huge, mostly GMO corn farms that belong to/produce for the giant corporations.
You realize how precious real food really is. And how lucky we are to be able to potentially have it, when so many are starving. Potentially, yes. Because most of the stuff that you find nowadays in the supermarkets cannot really be called real food. Most of it is processed. That is not food. That is stuff that they made with what used to be fresh food, plus a bunch of synthetic chemicals that were never meant for human consumption. Think about it. Take regular supermarket non-organic milk: if it's not organic, that means the cows were given antibiotics, they were fed genetically modified (GMO) corn, they probably never ate grass in their lives, and were fed a bunch of hormones to produce as much milk as possible. If we drink that milk, that means we are feeding ourselves nothing but hormones, antibiotics, and corn invented by chemists at a giant corporation (a specific one comes to mind). Antibiotics were not created to be eaten, they are a very special medicine for treating stuff that used to kills us by the millions. And now we eat it? Same goes for meat, poultry, pork... take mass-produced vegetables: they spray them with pesticides, herbicides, fungicides. Is that food? No! And yet, we eat it, and give it to our kids. Of course regulatory agencies tell us they are safe. But they used to tell us that DDT was safe before it was banned from the US. They still use it south of the border- and there is a whole lot of veggies that come from there.
Real food is food that is produced organically- without chemicals, hormones, antibiotics, or whatever else gets put into it. It is grains, vegetables, meat, eggs, milk, cheese... it is not diet protein shakes, cereals, sliced white bread, deli meat and cheese, potato chips, veggie chips, granola bars, soda, orange juice that comes from 3 different countries, ground beef from 3 different continents (just look at the label if you don't believe me, or do a little research), canned vegetables, bake mixes, chocolate milk, juice mixes, juice boxes, yogurt to go, lunchables, candy, fruit roll-ups, pop-tarts, frozen pizza, mini-cakes, twinkies, gum, chicken nuggets etc. That is convenience food. You can take it anywhere, eat it any time, so easy. And so dead, full of stuff with unpronounceable names, and so empty of any nourishment.
And yet, small farms are all around us. All you have to do is look a bit, and you will see that they do exist. And you can buy fresh vegetables from them. Fresh milk from cows and goats that eat nothing but grass (think how lucky we are to be in Florida, where they can graze all year round). Fresh meat, poultry, eggs, pork... all of that without any stuff added to it. So simple. And so delicious, which of course means that is also so very nourishing. Food, like so many children believe these days, does not come from the supermarket. It comes from the farm.

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