The Sunday Ramble. Yesterday my wife and I had to hit up the grocery store to get our standard restocking of the essentials. When we first got married, we ate at WalMart for 80% of our food, with a few choice items coming from more upper tier grocers. I was training back then, so I ate a lot of fish and chicken and rice and so forth to help me keep up with lean muscle mass. It was cheaper to buy food high in protein then it was to get supplements. And, looking back, since I ate a lot of EAS products (discounted via their deal with the MLB) its probably for the best that I did since many supplements are not FDA regulated and carry trace amounts of heavy metals. Then Bonnie started becoming more educated on where our food came from. We decide to upgrade a little and while I have absolutely nothing against WalMart (I still buy a lot of things there because it just makes sense to spend less on certain things when you can) their Organic, unprocessed selection wasnt/isnt that great. Fast-forward 5 years and we buy 90% of our food elsewhere. We’ve went from healthy but fully processed food eaters to healthy, unprocessed, organic, near vegetarian. We still eat fish (wild caught), but weve cut out chicken and red meat, and, though this may sound cliche, we really do feel better. There are less chemicals, GMOs, and trace contaminants in our food... but, there is also, at times, less taste, and less food. Eating smart and poison free is expensive. This bothers the hell out of me and is one of the reasons Im so desperate to grow my own food. It also bothers me because, frankly, I eat more than my wife who is near half my weight. Thats not me binge eating, that’s just me eating normal portions for a guy that still work outs a lot (I may not have been the best athlete, but after years of training I cant seem to feel like Ive done something in a day unless I work up a sweat). I used to be able to have a couple filets of farm raised, heavy metal exposed, cholesterol rich talpia. No big deal. Then I realized what I was eating and changed my intake. Now I can have a single portion of wild caught...uh... anything because the expense is so crazy high. But thats not all. Yesterday, Bonnie and I had to stock supplies for her coming Share Day with her special needs clients. Its an event she puts on twice a year where her clients can bring in their families and perform live for them in a concert like event. Its pretty cool to see these special kids get a chance to hop on stage and perform-its something they wouldnt get the chance to do elsewhere. There is even an after party, with refreshments and snacks. Boy, you think buying healthy food for yourself is expensive, try buying gluten free stuff for a special needs party. Sweet Jesus, a bag of Gluteno pretzels is $7! And its a half size bag. A case of cookies is $10! And they taste like baked styrofoam. I dont work in the profession everyday like my wife does, so pardon my sticker shock but, I did the math on things and realized that, if this is the kind of diet you have to fund in order to best help the health of your special needs child… my god, youd go in debt just feeding them, never mind all other incredibly costly services. My heart broke a little right then in there in the grocery store. As is, I dont like to go into these places and buy what I feel is elitist chow because, honestly, Ive been around folks that have aversions to low end food. They make me feel like crap and I want to stomp them, and their cardigans and Nalegen bottles. I grew up buying from ALDI and Marcs and Save A Lot. I worked at McDonalds for 2 years. I know what its like to 1) be poor and eat poor. 2) To eat crap and be thankful you got it. But those were also times of ignorance. There wasnt this massive movement to analyze your foods ingredients down to the atomic level, and trace it back to its forefathers to deduce where it came from. My mom fed me meat because that makes you strong. Milk because its good for bones. Grain because carbohydrates are good for you. And greens from a can because they were cheap (and whatever we didnt eat we could give to the food drives at school and look charitable). There was non of the GMO, organic, mercury flavored bullshit. There was just hey, its cheaper at this store. Beyond that, we could consume as much sugar as we wanted as long as we stayed active. I turned out okay, right? [dont answer that] Then you are confronted with the knowledge of whats going into you and what can happen if it continues. You start seeing the medical evidence. You start seeing where your food comes from. You are faced with a choice and its an expensive one: go for what feels like the BMW of foods or back to the Fiat, 6 for a dollar imitation food. Do you continue doing what youve always done or re-prioritize your spending and lifestyle to make a healthy change? I say all this to say, Im not buying high-end food because I think Im better than people who dont, I do it because this is the way I felt it was best to respond to the evidence I was confronted with. Im fortunate though. Ive achieved enough in my 32 years as a whatever the hell I am to afford some better fuel. Some families are not, and probably never will be. And some can’t, but must because they have a member of the family who will hurt by the products many grocery stores stock. I feel bad that we are making cheap food available that is, in many ways, poisonous and stripped of nutrients. I feel like well just pay for it on the back end in medical expenses, even though we cant currently correlate how food directly connects the two at the moment. I even feel bad because talking about this stuff often sounds like crazy, hippi, conspiracy, food propaganda. Next thing you know Ill be shoving hot yoga down your throat and telling you that mediation for 6 hours a day is the key to a perfect life, and that you should join me in my concrete bunker in colorado and see for yourself. Still, I cant shake this feeling that striving to eat better is something we should all do. For the short term and long term of our health, and for the long term for humanity (I said humanity...wow, now I do totally feel conspiratorial). If it becomes an expected and demanded item, then the costs comes down for all of us and the expectations and accountability goes up. I dont know. Maybe Im full of crap on this (which would really frustrate me because Ive been buying all the crap free eggs at this specialty grocer), but, like I said, this is just a Sunday Ramble.
Posted on: Sun, 15 Dec 2013 19:01:30 +0000
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