Please Keep Trying!

The new hybrid cars are amazing aren’t they? They can take the force used in braking and convert it into energy for the car. Crazy. You wanna know what’s crazier? Completely electric cars. Yeah, wish we had those around. They’re developing them right now, can you believe it? Know what else is unbelievable? Electric cars have already been invented (about one hundred years ago) and almost perfected (about fifteen years ago). For whatever reasons, take your pick, manufactures quashed this dream and in turn rolled out bigger, heavier gas guzzling monoliths.

This sounds to me what the food industry is doing to our food supply, quashing the older and healthier in favor of foods easier and cheaper to manufacture but are in demand. Think about it: back in the good ol’ days, great great granny and pappy had to make their own bread and were forced to eat what they grew or were able to trade for, which was also mostly what someone grew or made. Refined goods back then, such as sugar and salt, were a luxury few could afford.

Don’t get me wrong, there were some dark times in terms of food going bad and lack of production oversight, but all that started when food became mass produced thanks to technology. Mass production can be a boon as well, but isn’t it possible to mass produce foods which won’t kill us or make us fat?

Nowadays, you can’t escape from the sugar. It’s considered a luxury to buy home baked bread and to purchase foods with no refined sugars. We call those items “health foods”; granny and pappy just called ‘em “food”. Funny what a hundred years will do to your perspective.

People are slowly beginning to realize the foods they once considered a godsend (Wonderbread, lord knows why, was considered a godsend) are actually poisoning them. The partially hydrogenated soybean oil meant to save us all from the icky palm oil has instead been proven to do just the opposite. Palm oil is now back on the scene, making a comeback at twice the original price (it’s not a health food though, it’s still saturated fat!) Sugar, once so prized, is the new cocaine; a cheap and legal opiate available to everyone in every price bracket.

We’re confused when we go grocery shopping. People need degrees to understand what the hell it is they’re eating. What’s this new, fully hydrogenated oil? Is that a trans fat? It says trans fat free. What’s sucralose?

We’re getting eye strain from reading the fine print on the ingredient labels. We’re getting fatter because our food is more processed than our computers. We’re suffering from food technology.

Technology itself can be a fine thing. People live longer because of new cures and developments. We’re supposedly more connected than we ever were before. Our lives our enriched, our views are expanded, and our body’s are bloated but starving, because of technology. Americans are now suffering the effects of our poor food technology, and choices, by being stunted because of it. You know what we call our native diet? SAD: Standard American Diet.

My mom was ahead of her time. She would make our baby food because Gerber loaded its products with sugar and chemicals. She also grew her own organic produce and my dad would catch fish from small local ponds. Nowadays, people shell out good cash for healthy foods, organic produce and local goods.

I’m not saying we should all go back to growing our own food (it’d be nice if we had that kind of time) but one positive change we can make in our daily food consumption would be to boycott foods loaded with artificial chemicals and with refined ingredients, like white flour and sugar. It’s everywhere and it’s hard to avoid, but maybe by switching over one or two products twice a month could make a difference in how people eat.

One of the reasons I became so heavy was my mass consumption of refined goods. My body was never satisfied because I wasn’t getting any nutritional benefits from what I was eating. And the foods were addictive. Despite my mother’s best efforts, I succumbed to sugar addiction at an early age.

Now, I’m attempting to switch to foods which will treat my body well and give it the energy it needs, along with a feeling of satisfaction. I’m going to give agave syrup and xylitol a shot as a refined sugar alternative and hopefully, this is a toughie, start using more whole wheat in the kitchen. I’ll let you know how it goes, but it’s a challenge to make the right choices when we’re surrounded by easy ones.