So maybe I would go ballistic if I didn't have this blog to rant.
I have a friend who has many a good qualities but I haven't e-mailed her back since our last back and forth. You see, she is a member of the foodie elite and the quality of food is all important to her. She sent me one more link to a warning about food - this time about not eating farmed salmon - at a time when three species of salmon are almost extinct - and I couldn't take it any more.
I don't even like sea food. To me hell (or, well, one cave in it) would be being forced to eat sushi and drink beer.
Well, it wasn't just this last message. I had also been upset because I had told her about a place that brags about being Organic. They get funding because of Organic. However, when they gave free meals to the general public (no questions asked, which I like) the following happened.
1) The food for these incoming was rarely Organic or had fresh ingredients.
2) One higher up said that was OK because "the people who come to eat need the extra carbs."
3) Some people who put out the food held back from eating. I thought that this was because they wanted to be sure there was enough for the people who came to have a free meal, but it was really because they felt the free food was not good enough for them.
I thought this was all bad and she said "It doesn't matter, it's free food."
What, her nutrition is all important but other people can eat whatever?
That, and the e-mail message about not eating farmed salmon.
The other day someone told me that the man behind those inexpensive noodle soups that sometimes go five for a dollar, the dry noodle, which I myself have often eaten, usually throwing in some veggies and cracking an egg into the broth, started out trying to solve WORLD HUNGER.
I once knew someone who had no teeth and was poor and what he ate were 7/11 hot dogs almost every day.
There is eating something - anything - to stave off hunger pangs and then there is NUTRITION and BALANCED DIETS. It's all controversial but vegetarianism depends on protein from plants. That means not just veggies, but beans or legumes, nuts or seeds and food combining.
Where does poverty and need or ignorance collide with Food Weirdness that is an Eating Disorder?
So, after a few days I sent her a message about world hunger. I said I didn't know what the answer was, but there were a lot of people who could not even digest beans and legumes as a substitute for meat protein.
This morning I read that people in Great Britain are giving up their pets as unaffordable because human food prices have gone up.
I was once again reminded of years ago experiences when vegetarianism and veganism and so on were not even as trendy as they are now:
Going to a college that did have meat on the menu in some places on campus but where you could get stared down for eating tuna salad in front of a vegetarian.
Having a friend over for a year most Sunday nights to share a hot home cooked meal because I knew he was living in his RV. He had lost a lot of weight eating 99 Cents only salads and said he was vegetarian out of compassion for animals. He sure did wolf down chicken when I made it.
The young mother I met at a coffee house who had deliberately had a child young and single, struggling to afford a refrigerator, who fed the kid mostly bread and pastries. Said he'd never had meat in his lifetime. They looked healthy but...
The house mate from Germany who ate two things all year, pasta with some tomato sauce and tapioca pudding. She did try the little sausages I folded biscuits around, as I joked this was an All American recipe.
The friend who, when I met him, smoked cigarettes and pot, and ate meat. Got a girlfriend who was afraid of foods. When he got off the cigarettes and then the pot, we thought that was a good thing for his health. But it was about her converting him and controlling him. Then it was red meat, then it was poultry and fish, and as they got more and more radical, they announced they would not eat honey because bee keepers were mean to bees. They traveled with suitcases full of supplements.
He was getting fat from yogurt.
The news on World Hunger is always bad, but the starving children in Africa are in Africa and the children with bad nutrition are here in America.
Half of all American households are getting some food assistance funding from the Federal Government.
Seniors and disabled on fixed incomes are standing in food bank lines. The food given out is often repetitive (which is why the man who ate 7/11 hot dogs wouldn't go to a food bank any more.)
School lunch programs are sans much in the way of fresh veggies. The school nearest me sometimes has carrots or mini salads but is heavy on the pizza and burritos, chips, and muffins. Kids throw the whole bag away because it is repetitive, and then homeless people go into the cans to get the food.
Parents bring fatty and salty fast food home for dinner for themselves and the children.
We wonder why so many are diabetic.
I could go on...
C 2023 Christine Trzyna
