When you start to become food conscious, more so than you used to be at any rate, you start to buy less processed food. It starts to slowly dawn on you that the packaged crap at the grocery stores they sell is not food at all, just "pretend" food, like the playdough food molds you made as a kid. Look, mom, I made a hamburger! you proudly show to your mother, holding a bright little purple and blue patty. In fact, if it weren't for the fancy, colorful packaging and the bright logos and pictures with the fantastically-recognized brand names and their associated mascots, we wouldn't have the faintest clue how to tell the food apart from each other. We would have no clue what it is.Take this quiz to match the ingredients to the processed food and see how you do. What'd you get?
If you take the quiz, you should quickly notice that what we are told is food by the major food brands is clearly not food. Not even close. Not even the vegetarian Frankenfoods. We need the companies to come up with big fancy names to tell us what the food is or we would clearly have no idea. What's even funnier? Even when we are told the ingredients, we still have no idea what they are or where they come from. It has come down to the point where we need to hire a personal biochemist to tell us what's in the package, what we are putting into our bodies. It ain't food.
Nobody seems to know (or care.) Well, some of us care. The Italians have led the slow food movement since the 70's. Marion Nestle
, Michael Pollan
and Food Inc.
among many others have helped put our food concerns more on the map. NPR and Alternet.org have tons of articles on food. Veganism and macrobiotics have become the next cool thing, with Ellen Degeneres and Alicia Silverstone
giving these movements some seriously-needed celebrity-endorsed "brand recognition" as well. With all the diseases, environmental catastrophes, alarming food-related deaths, healthcare crises, rising food prices--how can we not be paying attention? We'd have to have our heads deep in the sand to not be aware of the real danger that E. coli and antibiotic-resistant pathogens in our food pose to us. Many of us do, many of us don't.Where do you stand? Are you buried down deep or are you coming up to the surface for some badly-needed air? Are you in denial or do you know what's up, you just "don't want to know." I get that one all the time: "Look, I don't want to know." Wherever we are, at some point the piper is going to get paid. For Americans, it's getting paid already:
#1 cause of death: Heart disease
#2 cause of death: Cancer
#3 cause of death: healthcare
Someone in the comment section of the Slate quiz above said they didn't care that there's synthetic chemicals in their food as long as they're not harmful to them. This is a perfect example of utter denial. The healthcare system is also supposed to be good for us in that they give us drugs to help us and heal us, and yet healthcare is the third highest cause of death in America. Still think the FDA and USDA-approved food industry isn't harmful to us? Think again. If the doctors and hospitals are killing us, what do you think our "safe" food industry is doing to us, which is largely ruled by giant non-regulated corporate behemoths? It ain't pretty, I can tell you that much.
Canada and the European Union are way more food conscious than America, in terms of regulations and bans on certain practices, but there is still a long way to go, and you should pretty much assume that Maple Leaf and Country Ribbon, just because they are Canadian, aren't all that safe, either. The Canadian Food Industry doesn't appear to be that regulated or "safe," and so until I hear otherwise, I'm going to lump Canadian food brands in with American ones and consider the entire food industry a North American epidemic that has actually become a global pandemic. President's Choice has tons of genetically-modified ingredients in their brand and they are not labelled. Remember the swine-flu scare? These pigs, though located in Mexico, belonged to the American company, Smithfield Foods, and Canadians everywhere got vaccinated for H1N1. It was a very real danger, so borders don't matter.
We must do our part, and no matter where we are in the sand, we must stop supporting the food industry giants as much as possible. It is our responsibility not just to protect ourselves but to help our neighbors, even if they do live across the world. For us Newfoundlanders, it's not an easy feat seeing as how 99.9% our food is imported. (At least we can eat somewhat locally during the summer months.) But if you live off The Rock, I'd love to hear your excuse.
Eat B(right),
Veggie Daddy
