Food for me is a fraught issue and always has been. I grew up with a mother who was overweight and hated it, but seemed unable to get a handle on her body weight. She tried different approaches over the years, including a "keto" type diet that appeared to work - until it didn't any more and she ballooned back up to above her previous weight plus a bunch. Filled with self-loathing at her "failure", she drowned her pain in bowls of pasta and butter, and a not insignificant amount of Darvon and Valium. I knew food was dangerous. I watched it hurt people. And I struggled personally with weight and body image for all of my life. "You are chubby, but not fat. Yet." was what I heard. If I started to nudge up the scale, my fatness was noted, commented on, and I was taken to task by my mother and my grandmother. Exercise was what was needed, I was told. And "watch what you eat", a nearly impossible task when the world of food information is so corrupted, and the person buying the groceries has issues of her own. And it tasted good. It filled holes I didn't know I had. A nice baggie of thin sliced deli roast beef slathered with mayonnaise and salt (hole the bread), or a spoon and the Peter Pan peanut butter jar can go a long way toward comforting a hurting girl. Of course they will also make her fat, and kill her eventually, but hey. Meat is on the pyramid. So are peanuts. It's all good. Anorexia and bulimia take care of the rest, right?
Except it's not all good.
The addictive potential of foods is something that I suspect will be much more widely studied in the future - and is being studied now. The brain that evolved to keep us alive in the face of constant danger and constant lack has been glutted in recent time with all of the things it so desperately craves for survival. Fat and sugar are not just abundant in our modern world - they exist in quantities that are embarassingly wasteful. Already there is growing public awareness of the addictive potential of processed and refined foods, and some growing awareness of the addictiveness of dairy from casomorphins. When people ask about how we eat, and I respond that we do not consume meat or dairy, very little alcohol, and no processed or refined foods, cheese probably ranks as high as booze on the list of things people believe they cannot live without.
The idea that we "deserve" to be happy, indulged and 'spoiled' with food and goods is a new one. Historically we didn't have the time or space for indulgence, and we were, in many ways, healthier for it. Now - now we are affluent in ways we don't even recognize, whining endlessly about our lack and our needs - while killing ourselves with a glut of the most dangerous and unhealthy foods on the planet. Meanwhile we are spreading our affluenza around the world as fast as we can. And in truth, the food we eat in the standard American diet actually encourages and causes auto-immune disease, depression, anxiety, obesity, cardiac disease, diabetes, cancer, and on and on and on.
We're killing the planet, too. Animal agriculture is well documented as the leading cause of environmental devastation when taken as a whole - if you include "production" (that means raising animals in ethically intolerable ways, feeding them biologically incompatible foods, in numbers that blow your mind), slaughter (another word for that is killing), transportation, etc. And don't get me started on the oceans. We have fished them to the near-extinction of multiple species and show no indications of letting up.
How dare I speak, right? I hear you. I mean a few years ago right here on this very blog I posted about raising and slaughtering chickens in my front yard. I held chickens hostage and stole their eggs for food. I sold those eggs at a profit so I could buy more feed and make more eggs and more chickens to kill for more meat. Get off your high horse, Melissa. Or "Here she goes again...".
Yup. Here she goes again. Because every step I have taken to this point has been a quest for knowledge and truth, a search for truth endlessly blockaded and stymied by fake and pseudo science, by big ag, by other people searching for truth who thought they, too had found the answers. So have I taken lot of wrong turns? You better believe it. Would have been helpful if the people with the money hadn't been throwing blockades and banana peels all over my path. Bastards.
If the big "they" had just told us the truth from the beginning, it wouldn't have taken so many wrong steps and broken paths to get to here.
The truth is that no other mammal consumes milk after infancy, and none of them consume the milk of other animals (say, humans drinking the milk of cows for example). Nature gave us all perfect infant food in our own bodies - breast milk. Now I am not going to get into the politics of "breast is best", or the mom-bashing over formula that I see all the time, except to say this: we all make decisions based on the information we have at hand. If you are a working mother, and your pediatrician tells you that it's ok if you feed formula, you will believe them. If you are a poor mother and your pediatrician tells you that WIC can help you by providing supplemental food, and one of those foods offered is formula, you are going to take it. Again, greater forces are at work under those decisions than meets the eye. It is in the best interest of the dairy industry to addict your babies as soon as possible. It is in the best interests of formula manufacturers to sell their product by any means necessary. Individuals who make choices based on shitty information (also called lies) are not to blame. The government and large medical organizations who bow to lobby pressure however...that's a different story.
The truth is that ALL refined sugar (that includes maple syrup and honey - which is food for bees, not people) is too high in calories for most humans to consume safely, and has addictive properties similar to those of cocaine. And artificial sweeteners are just...artificial. And have a host of problems from artificially jacking up blood sugars to damage to the nervous system to keeping the addiction to "sweet" going in our badly damaged brains.
The truth is that until very recently in human history the "gathering" made up the bulk of what went into your body. The "hunting" was wasteful of time and energy, didn't provide enough calories to feed the village, and was a supplement consumed irregularly and in very small quantities - a deer for a village, perhaps, or a rabbit for a family. (Not a rabbit EACH, roasted, with a pile of processed oil-rubbed potatoes and a teensy side of something that was once greenish.) The women, children and old people fed the village. The men went out and "hunted" - probably with beers and a group of like-minded men who were too lazy to pick berries and cut leaves and grasses.
The truth is that we can change. If you had told me a year ago that Gene would be asking why we hadn't had soy milk yogurt in a while, and when could we have some again? I would have laughed in your face. If you had told me that he would not only no longer consume animal products, but express contentment and peace with that, I would have called you a crazy liar. And yet...here we are. If you see him, ask him yourself. I'm always the evangelical mouthpiece. But he will answer if asked, and his answers surprise the people who've known him longest.
I have one kid who says he isn't going to change his eating habits because after all, he's going to die anyway, may as well die happy, just ten years earlier. My mother said that a lot.
Yup. He is going to die. And maybe ten years earlier. But he is going to suffer. Maybe it will take a few more years to catch up with him, as it did with his father. But he is going to suffer - and if he continues down the path and still doesn't change? Well. Diabetes causes vascular damage. Diabetes lose fingers and toes, vision. They develop cardiovascular disease - strokes, heart attacks. They lose control of their bladders. They don't just up and die. They suffer for a long time first. So yeah, die ten years earlier, after twenty or thirty of misery. Or not. I am hoping for not myself. I am like that. I like to hope.
It would be easy to wallow in anger - that the answers are so clear, so simple, and so EASY - and that I myself missed them and fell for the Atkins bullshit a decade or so ago really pisses me off. The answers are even CHEAP. And we are having trouble listening, because our ears and eyes - like mine were - are blocked up with addictive things that the government is going to keep encouraging at the risk of pissing off the big ag interests that give them so many dollars a year that they are scared to say no. And it goes beyond that, really, into some nefarious, sneaky mafia-like behaviors and scenarios that also make me sick. Why can't the National Geographic photographer photograph your confined feeding operation, Mr. Meat-Man? Why can't the people see inside your chicken sheds and your pig barns and your slaughterhouses? Why? Got something to hide? Scared, much? Afraid that if people see the misery and death and horror that they ingest daily, they might...oh...STOP? I am more afraid that they won't.
This is rambling and ranting, I know - but you have to admit I am good at both. I don't care today because I am angry. Someday maybe I will make more sense and have an outline. Today I just wanted to rant. Tomorrow...well, tomorrow I'll talk about the good news. Because there really is good news. Cheap, easy, clear good news.
1 comment:
Preach it, sister!
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