These past two weeks I’ve been finding myself eating far too much fast food simply because of my attempting to crunch time. Indeed fast food has its place in our hurried up world, but making a daily routine of it is not to my liking. Today, I was waiting for someone to arrive and struck up a conversation with several employees behind a service counter. We found ourselves on the subject of natural foods and began talking about how people have become acclimated to eating things that are no longer tasty or healthy for us. One woman said that if you put a dish of butter outside with a dish of margarine, the birds will eat the butter but won’t touch the margarine. She also went on to say that the chemical makeup of margarine is one molecule different than plastic. Oh Mercy! If that’s correct, I’m glad I never had a hankering for oleo margarine. I don’t even like drinking beverages from plastic or styrofoam cups. Whatever liquid that’s in those types of containers always taste different to me.
One of the gentlemen that was there joined in by saying that as chance would have it, there was a half loaf of bread left in a camper for several months and when discovered, there was no mould or de-composition of the bread other than it was pretty stiff. I haven’t left any bread long enough to become old, but many years ago I found a partial loaf of bread in a refrigerator that was indeed moldy. The types of preservatives that are placed in food products must be more complex and state-of-the art to give the products a longer shelf life. There are a handful of people who are very sensitive to MSG, a.k.a. monosodium glutemate. What they claim it does to them is either upset their stomachs, give headaches, or develop a feeling of being bloated. I watched a program several years ago on PBS about how the Greeks and Romans made their form of MSG from decaying minnow-sized fish. I guess it was considered a primitive form of a taste enhancer.
Just before my customer arrived, I suggested to the employees an idea regarding how people could start becoming more “Blue Zone” in their diets. If people would use their days off to really work at making their main meal of the day from as much natural produce they can find, they would become standardized in their awareness of eating healthy. Those meals, from the appetizers, to the main courses, and including the desserts, would be created as much from scratch as possible and using as many all natural ingredients they could find. I assured them that if they would do it long enough, it would become a habit within the family unit and likely more days added in the future. Unless someone’s taste buds are dead, they will be able to tell the differences in taste. Someone told me not too many months ago that she would rather eat less quantity due to the cost of eating natural, rather than eating more of something that costs less simply because mass production has lowered the cost of quantity. I thought about that concept and fully agreed. For a country that is facing increased health problems with over-weight people, it would only make sense to consider the “less is more” idea regarding our food. Now, thinking about it, my mouth is watering and my taste buds are screaming, “Let’s all cry for stir fry!”
