**Rant Alert**
I was in the supermarket the other day passing the dairy section. And there they were, side by side — DanActive, Activia, and several similar items with even less tasty names. Call me crazy (and some have) but I want my food to sound like appetizing food. I don’t want to eat food that sounds like medicine or reminds me that it contains some little living organisms that are going to play games in my gut. If it’s food, it should look and sound delicious and be marketed as food. If it’s medicinal, sell it at the drugstore.
I also don’t like having to dig through all kinds of “light,” “low-sodium,” “fat-free,” “sugar-free” products to find just plain ol’ food. Sell that healthy stuff at a health food store, please! We’re not all on diets, even if maybe we should be. Don’t go making my food “healthy” by leaving part of it out. Did I ask you to do that? I want the real deal; if I decide to go on a diet, I’ll skip stuff or find a substitute or eat less of something. But if I want donuts, I want all the sugar, fat, and white flour it takes to make a real donut. And what good is a coffee creamer if it’s fat-free, sugar-free, and non-dairy? Come on, the fat, sugar, and dairy are in there for a reason; take them out and you have a totally different product (“tasteless white coffee coloring”?). Don’t keep calling it “creamer” and putting it on the shelf next to the real McCoy. At least put the “healthy” foods in a special section so I don’t have to sort though them to find what I want.
Don’t even get me started on the “TV dinner” section. Living alone, I eat a lot of those convenient dinners-for-one. At least two-thirds of them now are “Healthy Choice” or something similar. That’s code for less meat, more veggies, less salt, smaller portions, etc. Yes, I know, it’s all marketing — the producers and stores trying to give the consumers what they want. Oh, really?
At this rate, it’s easy to imagine that futuristic world where our meals are compressed into tablets. Take out all the good stuff and the non-essentials, compress what’s left in order to reduce packaging, shelving, and storage requirements (it’s the “green” thing to do), and you have bottles of pills. Yum.
Argh! It’s a conspiracy, I tell ya! A conspiracy!
yes, supermarkets are quite absurd. i also speculate on the possibility of nutrition tablets… personally, i think it’s more likely that we continue to compose our diets with processed foods.. and that’s an entirely different matter.
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Emotionally, I doubt humans would do well with just tablets. I don’t mind processing as long as it continues to include real food, not just a lot of fake this and synthetic that.
Yah! Now they are even altering the molecular structure of the food… most corn, canola, potatoes, and soy beans grown in North America are genetically-modified, that’s like ‘synthetic’. What’s even worse is we don’t even know we’re eating it because they don’t have to label it. Thanks for speaking out, it’s refreshing.
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I don’t know if I have a problem with genetically modified grains. It’s comparable to hybridization, isn’t it? And isn’t it done for the same reasons, to improve the crop’s resistance to disease, or drought, or make it grow faster? Have these grains been shown to be harmful to humans? I’ve never looked into it.
This is why I’m learning to hunt and gather and grow, just as the ancient ones did. It is about time humans become more self-sustainable. We take for granted that any food we want is available at the grocery store and we can just swipe our credit cards to take it home. What happens if crisis hits and the mass mobs pillage the shelves, leaving nothing? The only ones able to avoid the anarchy are the ants who have grown and harvested their own food, and have enough bullets to defend themselves from the grasshoppers who come to steal it.
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So you’re a “survivalist”? Or just an avid hunter/outdoorsman? Either way, you’ve landed in a good place. As nearly as I can tell, the Rockies have everything you need.