I was sitting in Taco Bell yesterday (a pretty rare occasion these days) thinking about how glad I was that I’m no longer addicted to fast food. Growing up, I’d have sold my soul for a Big Mac, and even then I didn’t know why – it didn’t actually taste good, but perhaps because my parents wouldn’t indulge in it that often there was just “something” about it.
Now, every time I eat at McDonalds I not only don’t enjoy it, I actually get sick from it – so we’ve pretty much scratched that off the list of places to go. There’s a Mexican restaurant in Hartford City called La Palmas which is absolutely fantastic, and given the fact that for a little over half as much again my wife and I can eat substantially more and not have it be rapid-fire processed garbage, well… I don’t think I’ll be volunteering to go to Taco Bell too often any more either.
It’s so funny how much garbage is in our food, and what it all boils down to is for the sake of “keeping garbage out”. Think about it, we eat highly processed shit, rationalizing that because it’s uniform in quality it’s okay… better than the alternative of raising our own meat in a healthy way and having to get rid of a bad batch of meat once in a while, most of us would much rather buy stuff that’s been injected with co2, hormones, and all other manner of crap on the flimsy promise it’s not going to be bad.
A friend of mine was pondering catching and selling the crawfish that grow on his property, and I warned him to be pretty careful because there’s been a rash of raids going around where the FDA or whoever’s involved have been raiding “organic co-ops” because they trade in meat and such that hasn’t passed through any type of inspection. I just didn’t want him to have his door kicked in over some crawfish, but it also got me thinking about how silly we are about the “quality” of our food.
I think the root cause of the problem is that people in the west want to have their cake and eat it too (pun unintended). We want the FDA to stay out of our business and keep off the farmer’s backs, yet we want to give them hell when there’s a bad batch of food. We piss and moan about how Country X has had Pill Y for 6 months now and the “damn FDA” hasn’t approved it for use here yet. Then when the FDA approves something, or worse, when something is sold that skirts the FDA’s jurisdiction, we scarf them down and then complain when the latest batch of diet pills makes our brains bleed.
I think personally, for my own well-being, I’m going to stay the course I’m on right now. I’m going to endeavor to eat real food, and exercise it off. If we reach our end goal of coming into some property, I’m going to grow my own beef and try to minimize the amount of crap I ingest.
