My chiropractor has a chicken nugget sitting on her shelf that is four years old. And it looks like you could dip it in barbecue sauce and chow down. It’s not discolored. It’s not shrunken. It looks exactly like it did four years ago when it came hot out of the magic oil at McDonalds. Today I threw away a bowl of chicken that I cooked six days ago because it had gone bad. So what…I have to wonder…is the difference between that nugget and that thigh.
That is what keeps me up at night wondering if I’m slowly killing my children with the choices I make every single day in the grocery store…in the kitchen…and in my home.
Every week I walk the isles of the grocery store in a daze of confusion. I scan the labels…pick things up and put them back…wonder and whine and consider the options while walking endlessly back and forth. I peruse the familiar selections and calculate carbs while eyeing the unknown with the ignorance of a preschooler in a college course. And then…
I end up buying the same old crap I always have because I don’t know what the heck else I’m supposed to do.
I can’t be the only person living in this frustrating limbo of ‘what to feed my family’. I read the internet, I Google and research. I hear twenty different versions and theories about each food group. And honestly, the confusion over who to believe is flabbergasting. And so, in the end, I just keep doing the same old thing.
And we all know that if you always do what you’ve always done…you’ll always get what you always got.
And so the cycle continues.
I’ve spent a good deal of time this summer eating back the pounds I lost last year and have plumped myself right back up to my pudgy self. I’m not really in bad shape, physically, as far as being able to carry a log or huck a piece of firewood, but the bulge does get in the way of bikini clad potential in a big way and I just don’t feel like I’m as energetic as I could/should be.
And my kids…what must be going on inside their innocent little bodies? How are they even still alive, with all the junk that’s on the market today?
I don’t think it’s the fat…the sugar…the sheer number of calories…that’s putting us all over the edge. Though there are certainly limits to how much of the bad stuff we should consume and I could sure stand to cut back.
I don’t think the chocolate chip cookie I’m eating at this very moment is going to do me in. Destini made it this evening from ingredients in my kitchen. I know exactly what’s in it and where they came from…for the most part. I know my chickens laid the eggs and nothing unpronouncable went into the making.
I’d be even better off if I’d ground my own flour and used honey instead of sugar. But overall, not a horrible choice of an occasional treat…occasional.
But I do think that if I’d eaten the same cookie from a department store package, that I’d be consuming my own demise. I do believe what is killing us…what is making us fat, making us sluggish, making us look like a pack of hungry, hungry hippos…is the chemicals and preservatives and additives of unknown origin that are packed into our processed foods to make them last longer. Because we all want that cookie to still look brand new in three months. That’s not gross at all…
I see the examples time and time again. If I pull a moose roast out of my freezer and forget to cook it…as I did this week…it goes bad in the fridge within days and I have to throw it out. Now that moose was frozen into roasts within days of being killed. It has no chemicals, no nothing. That moose didn’t likely wander into a field of preservatives and steroids…no, he was raised on birch branches just down the road from me and so I know exactly what I’m eating when I cut into a steak.
But the beef that I pick up at the local market…that’s been sitting around for who knows how long? The package expiration date is six days out when I grab it from the shelf. It’s been transported from the lower 48 by truck after being slaughtered, processed, packaged and then frozen and before it ever gets anywhere close to my crock pot, it’s been preserved, steroided and pumped up with chemicals as it gobbled grain from a bucket in a line with six hundred other cows being fed the same quick grow crap. And even after all that, it still lasts five days in my fridge before it starts to turn a funny color and stink up the veggie bin.
And the same goes with every other food product. My real chedder will mold and dry out in a day if I leave it exposed. But Velveeta…what the heck is that? Fresh farm chicken is gross after two days in the fridge, yet those store bought birds fly all the way to Alaska via refrigerated cargo, are packaged as ‘fresh not frozen’, pumped with some kind of chemical to make it look edible and sit next to my milk for five days before it’s garbage. They are both chicken….yet something’s not quite making sense here.
It’s gotta be the stuff they pump them with both before and after death, that makes them able to transport five thousand miles and be sold as ‘fresh’. And don’t even get me started on ‘fresh’ eggs…
My point is, if they and make a chicken nugget look tastier than the day it came out of the fryer after it sits on a shelf for four years…and create a cookie that’ll survive a nuclear war unscathed and still be soft and chewy when I dip it in my milk, I have to wonder…
What are all those chemcals doing inside my body? Am I being preserved? After I die, will they crack open my coffin six years later and find I look exactly the same…chemically embalmed by my own habits…mummified alive by the habits I’ve grown to despise.
Maybe…just maybe…I want to live to ninety by my own merits, and not because I’ve been frozen in time by the additives in my fried chicken sandwich. Perhaps it’s time…no really…to finally make a change.
