I wish I could say that I share the peaceful state of mind as this sow out at TLC Ranch, but I am fretful about the outcome of the elections, most especially knowing that the manufacturer of the Diebold voting machines, proven time and again easily hacked and gladly compromised, is a zealous Fundamentalist with an agenda. I will still be exercising my right to vote, as I have every single election (except one primary) since 1978. And with my cynical mood in mind, you may proceed.
As part of a book-buying bonus several months ago, I received a copy of Can You Trust a Tomato in January?: The Hidden Life of Groceries and Other Secrets of the Supermarket Revealed at Last, by Vince Statten, published in 1993 (but not terribly outdated to read...though things have probably just gotten worse). I don't think Statten brings the necessary level of suspicion or cynicism that I (or most of you) do to the grocery store, but the book is still full of thought-provoking facts that shed light on the distance between what I think of as real, clean food and corporate/manufactured so-called food. I randomly opened the book to page 98, which contains this sentence: “Lemon Pledge furniture polish contains more lemon than Country Time Lemonade.”
I do like the way the book starts:
“My grandmother once went twelve years without leaving the family farm. If she needed anything, she send one of her boys, one of my uncles, to fetch it from the general store three miles up the road. Today my family seldom goes a day without stopping at a grocery of some sort—convenience store, supermarket, hypermarkets, or warehouse store.
“My grandmother raised eight children on a forty-acre farm that was almost 100 percent self-sufficient. 'The only things we ever bought were sugar and coffee,' recalls my uncle Luther. The family raised corn and wheat, potatoes and tomatoes. There was a grove of fruit trees. They kept a couple of milk cows for their dairy needs and a couple of slop hogs to eat the garbage and provide bacon and lard. When the harvest was bountiful, they canned and dried for the inevitable bad season. And when the cows had calves, they substituted water for milk in their cooking.”
But the problem is that Statten prints statements like this one: “It's a straight line, if a long one, from the caveman's curdled dinosaur milk to the forever fresh miracle food [n.b., it is neither food nor a miracle] called Cheez Whiz. And a necessary line according to Richard Roak, director of the Federal Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition: ‘Without food additives, we'd all live like cavemen.’ ”
Excuse me, Mr. FDA, but your head is up your ass. Excuse me, Mr. FDA, but bullsh-t!
Or maybe, Mr. FDA, you would like to amend your statement to say that some food additives are a boon to society, but that doesn't mean that concocting chemical replications of nutritious food (fruit, vegetables, cheese, meat, you get the idea: things directly produced from the earth at a farm or ranch) is a corporation's carte blanche right. We don't need all the additives that exist, in other words.
Statten dissects the grocery store in an interesting way: literally, aisle by aisle. He states, “My best advice for the reader is to use this book for its intended purpose—a few giggles and a couple of I-didn't-know-thats about the food supply—not as a nutrition guide or as a diet book.” Well, cynic that I am, I used it, in part, as an indictment of the corporations who produce these unreal, death-giving foods.
Samples of his words:
• But there's a price to pay for year-round produce. Taste. [The apples and tomatoes of today] have been bred for looks and for long hauls in trucks and boats. And for mass-market tastes, which means a blander-tasting product.
• If we want tomatoes in January, we have to take what we can get. A red piece of pulp.
• Velveeta cheese was on the cutting edge of the American technological revolution. It was the first food product extensively studied by university researchers. Kraft set up a special research fellowship at Rutgers University specifically for the study of Velveeta.
There are tons of factoids, such as the year Jell-O and other products “were introduced.” (Emphasis mine: imagine introducing an apple to a shopper.) There are the histories of competing food corporations, and lots of anecdotal things like the demographics of the "heavy user" of frozen pizza. If you are the sort of person who can still wax nostalgic about the kind of candy you ate as a kid, then you will probably enjoy this little book (it's 225 pages long). He's not an idiot, not by a longshot—he can be witty, and nails down his stories economically. I read it cover to cover, occasionally dismaying at the long reach that food corporations have down our throats.
In looking around the web for information on bad food additives and acceptable ones, I found that the Better Health Channel in Australia had a very readable article on reading labels on food. Funny, though, because there are no labels on the realest food (fruits and vegetables), and they should exist on supermarket meats. (10% fecal soup in your Foster Farm chicken, anyone?)
I liked the section Nutrition claims on labels, but then "Don’t be misled by labelling tricks and traps” is always good advice to shoppers, who have to be vigilant about marketing manipulation and ploys. (In our house, we mute all commercials. Hey, it's a baby step towards thinking for yourself.) Note that Australia's food laws will vary from those in the U.S., but it's a good place to start.
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EDIT: NaBloPoMo randomizer right here.
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And that's it from Grouchville, USA. Go vote the bastards out of office.
THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY: “As people do better, they start voting like
Republicans—unless they have too much education and vote Democratic,
which proves there can be too much of a good thing.” — Grand Wizard Karl Rove
Emphasis mine.
Nigerian saying:
Not to know is bad.
Not to want to know is worse.
Not to hope is unthinkable.
Not to care is unforgivable.
Thanks for visiting. I'm headed to the gym, going to work on hope and caring. And then vote. Maybe twice.
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