I have a lot of problems with food. And not necessarily the ones you'd think. (Though, take a good look at my curves and you can safely guess I've got those, too.) My biggest problems with food come in a form of impatience. I don't care enough about it to deal with it. It's a hassle to figure out. And shop for. And cook. Tim and I have a long-time understanding that, should something ever happen to him, I will likely die of starvation. I'll live off whatever cereal we have in the house until it's gone... and then I will just slowly allow myself to fade away. The autopsy will reveal cause of death as "Apathy."
So, last night, I allowed myself an experiment. I went to the store, and wandered the aisles. Slowly. Really considering what I would actually be interesting in eating, come lunchtime the following day. On any ordinary trip, my impatience would get the best of me, and not finding anything immediately to my liking, I'd give up and leave - assuring myself another lunch of whatever-looks-least-processed-in-the-vending-machine. But since I had nothing to do and nowhere to be, I forced myself to take a little more time.
The siren's call from the cereal aisle eventually proved too strong to ignore, so I veered my cart-ship down the row, absentmindedly wondering when the American public had decided they needed 47 varieties of Special K. And that's when I saw it.
It wasn't the first time I'd been annoyed by food-disguised-as-other-food, but for some reason, this time it really gave me pause. Cap'n Crunch is a great cereal - though, health food, it is not. Was it really necessary to take a perfectly unhealthy sugared breakfast cereal and repackage it as an even UNHEALTHIER dessert? While the crotchety old man in my head prepared his angry remarks on childhood obesity, the physical me kept slowly cruising the aisles. And like the breakfast cereal that broke the camel's back, suddenly it began to occur to me how much STUFF was in these grocery aisles. And none of it was food. Oh, it was edible, alright. But 90% of it had been manufactured from chemicals and by-products and dyes and cardboard and donut flavoring. I began to recall articles I'd read about American grocery stores being "impossibly well-stocked," and how surprising it must be to foreign travelers to see aisles and aisles of food available. In every variety imaginable.
But the problem being... it wasn't food.
I'm going to gently fold my star-spangled trio-of-eagles t-shirt and set it aside for a moment to simply ask the question, "WTF, America?" What are you trying to accomplish here? Does anyone really benefit from this much variety? This many choices? Are we really such terrible consumers that this is what it takes to get us to keep buying? We've oversaturated ourselves with glossy, nacho-cheese flavored, 99% processed, family-sized bags of crap, and it's become so commonplace, no one even sees it anymore. And being alive long enough to know what bags of crap I like, I didn't even notice how many new bags of crap had sprouted up while I wasn't looking.
I know this is the point of the story where an ordinary person might make a great life change. They'd abruptly decide to grow all their own food. Or only shop at Whole Foods. Or buy only locally-sourced, no-GMO, organic, biodynamic, permaculture grown, sustainably raised chickens whose names they already know. But, for someone who can barely decide they might like to eat a sandwich sometime later in the week, that seems pretty overwhelming.
I'm not really looking for an answer here. And I'm not going to turn into a person whose entire Facebook feed is devoted to telling people their favorite foods are poisoning them. (Yes, we know. Don't be smug.) But it was a pretty revelatory evening. And I sense there may actually be small changes in my future - be it the occasional trip to Whole Foods. Or finally weeding out our garden in the backyard and planting a few veggies. (I will never eat a chicken whose name I know, however... at that point we're friends, and I'm not ready to go vegan.) But I might actually read a few of those your-food-is-poisoning-you articles people love to shove in my face, because I've finally noticed for myself that, while they're still smug, they may be true.
Wouldn't it be interesting if the market research that gave us Sprinkled Donut Crunch went into Keeping the American Public Trim, Happy and Not Full of Chemicals? I know it isn't a new thought, but daaaaaaaamn it would be super convenient for us impatient, careless foodies if the FDA had public interest truly at heart.
No comments:
Post a Comment