Food for Thought

America is coming. The nation of overeating in general and eating badly at that. It makes me a little nervous, because I've lost all trust in the food there. Even terms like 'organic' and 'natural' are just ways of the marketing apparatus to sell items at a premium price. Living according to Michael Pollan's 'Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly Vegetables.' is hard work in a country where you can buy 2 kiwi's for $1.20 or a 48 pack of Ding-Dong's for the same price. And I even have the resources to choose more expensive choices.

Why does food depress me? Maybe I watch too many documentaries and talks by food critics or books by similarly outspoken people. I don't even bother paying attention to what 'official' agencies in the U.S. say you should eat or read medical studies or even the ingredient box on the side of the package. They are all pressured (if not outright funded) by special interest groups who want to keep food cheap, their profits growing and their consumers in bad health. I just can't stop wondering when I pick up a vegetable or piece of meat I actually recognize as food, what might be in it. Chemicals, steroids, genetic tinkering, preservatives, enhancers and coloring.

And so when we leave for the States in two days and get through the airline food (which you KNOW is bad for you - they don't even try to make it taste good) I will valiantly try to hold up my banner of clean living as long as possible. No reheated prepackaged food from Applebee's or Chilli's, no over-sized portions or slabs of beef dripping from bleached simple carbohydrate bread at fast food joints and certainly no corn syrup/starch masking as soda, ketchup, chicken or other prepackaged products. BUt I will also refuse to pay $150 for a dozen products at Whole Foods who claim to be all organic (how organic is it again when the food comes from half-way around the world?).

But I know I'm a hypocrite, because the occasional burger or root beer will slip in (curse my socially brainwashed upbringing) and so will the gourmet (non-Fairtrade) coffee, laced with corn syrup and Amazon grown soy-bean milk. Towards the end I will be scarfing down bigger portions forgetting again what it was to actually be hungry twice a day, dizzy from the saturated fats and sugars until my high blood pressure and cholesterol send my heart in a frenzy and I feel the urge to come back to Bangkok. Simon and Sally may fight the ultimate corporate bad guys in the Amazon rain forest, but their spiritual parents are not that strong.

I will bring my 443 page digital draft with me to redraft in the odd hours at our house in Illinois. I'll keep you appraised.