Processed Foods

F ood, one assumes, provides nourishment: but Americans
eat it fully aware that small amounts of poison have been
added to improve its appearance and delay its putrefaction.”
-- John Cage

It is good to compare ingredients between the name-brand and store brand
foods. In one example, the name-brand sausage had MSG in
it, the store brand did not. “It just has to be good, not good for you.”
Should there be skull and crossbones on the stuff that some people
call food, yet it really resembles something made in a lab? There is
one grocery store item that reads “For Best Results, Remove Cap.”
Shouldn’t the label on most processed foods read. “For best results:
Do Not Open, Do Not Use”? Also, if a food label misspells the item it
is supposed to resemble, you might want to double-check that purchase.
For example, cheese is properly spelled with an S, not a Z. If
it says “cheez,” it’s not cheese! Just some fake food for thought.

Why the brightly colored food and drink? To attract attention, of
course. In nature, bright colors of flowers and fruits attract animals
and insects. They, in turn, drink the nectars, eat the fruits and nuts,
pollinate other plants, and disperse the seeds. In the supermarket,
bright colors attract consumers. However, the only things that spread
by this attraction are consumers’ waistlines. Food processors list nutritional
information on packaging because they are required to do
so by the FDA. They have turned this to their advantage, making it
seem as though their ingredients have nutritional value. You are the
CEO, and you must decide what constitutes nutrition for you.

Pick up a box of cookies and recite the ingredients to yourself. Unless
you can’t read it because the printing is so small. When you
start pronouncing the ingredients, it almost sounds like a silly song.
If you keep up those little songs, things can happen to you:

1. People will stare at you like you are crazy.
2. People will start joining in.
3. You will make a food choice other than processed cookies.

This may sound crazy to you, but to the manufacturers of the product,
it is sweet music. Eating those cookies would be the equivalent
of going to the cash machine and receiving Martian money instead
of dollars and responding with “That’s okay, it’s still money.” Martian
money is not accepted currency here; the stuff in the processed
cookies with ingredients that are foreign to you is unacceptable currency
for your body.

Understand that when someone says, “but it’s all chemicals,” we say,
“we sure hope so,” because chemistry is life. It is not chemicals in
general that are problematic, but the combination of chemicals in the
wrong place at the wrong time making reactions in your body that are
not good for you.

Preserving foods came to us with a respectable past and a valuable
pedigree. Foods were dried, salted, pickled, smoked and/or treated
with spices and herbs. This allowed foods to be kept for long periods
of time, to extend the life of the hunt and harvest, to be safe enough
so they didn’t kill the people who ate these foods. People did this in
order to preserve foods for times when harvest was past and hunting
was poor, to keep from starvation until the next cycle of seasons
for hunting and growing.

Salting kept the bacteria off food, kept it from rotting, and kept people
from dying due to food poisoning. In some places, salt was very
expensive, kept under lock and key and under the watchful eye of
the keeper of the keys, the mistress of the house. Your ancient ancestors
were no different from yourself. They were the true CEOs,
and their ability to manage their resources determined if people lived
or died, ate or starved. They actually had to lock up food or come
March, there would be nothing to eat.

Late winter and early spring were especially difficult times. Life and
death often depended on how good last season’s hunting and gathering
was. Native North American Indians referred to late winter and
early spring as “Killing Times,” the reference meaning once you ate
what you had on hand there was no more. People died. No fast food,
pizza, Italian, Mexican, Thai. Nothing.

Shift to the twenty-first century. Whether you like it or not, there are
processed foods everywhere you look, everywhere you shop, at the
restaurant, at parties, everywhere. We have no more cycles. We
are not dying of starvation in February. Preserved foods have developed
into processed foods. Produce is shipped in from all over the
world. When we have winter, they have summer. Voila! Peaches in
March. Asparagus in November.

We can follow the trends: “40 is the new 30,” “60 is the new 50,”
“Pink is the new black,” and, in the food industry, “Sugar is the new
fat.” Everyone was blaming fat for all the weight gains, so the food
processing people took the fat out of your foods for you. Remember,
it is all about you. But did you notice anyone getting skinnier? They
replaced the fat with sugar so the newly concocted foods would at
least taste like something edible. Now they realize our body needs
fat, especially your brain cells that need it for your nervous system to
communicate to the other body systems.