The Four Horsemen of Chemicals
The four horsemen of food chemicals.
High fructose corn syrup
Cane sugar
Natural flavor
Artificial food dyes
Just four ingredients, and if I choose a diet that eliminates those, I also eliminate most of what is sold in the average grocery store. The soda pop, the nacho chips and potato chips, the rows and rows of candy, let’s not mention the other ingredients I didn’t already list, the ones that grow mucus in the back of my throat like I’m choking on plastic. The grocery store is full of literal, actual poison. They might do a little better to the north but the improvement is marginal. How many of us have slept through the shift? How many people have laid down in their bed with a bag full of poison to munch on and not said one thing about it?
Where did the food go? Where did the FOOD go?
I want to eat food that was cooked not processed. I want to eat whole food, clean food, sustainable food. Food that doesn’t send me into spiraling cramps of gastrointestinal suffering so dark and deep that I fear one day it will quite literally kill me. Can you die from eating chemicals? Well, yes of course you can. And the likelihood it happens with a bag of d*rit0s, sour candy, and a bottle of c*ke, isn’t small.
Before I realized these ingredients set off my gut and wrecked my day regularly, I went through a terrible journey, and I still am, as whatever has been done to my insides isn’t just going to disappear. Especially if I can’t find clean food to eat.
Did you know if you eat anything fried from any restaurant, you are consuming a type of Butane? It’s an additive to frying oil to prevent foaming. FDA approved. My belly aches after eating out - and my complete satiation when cooking at home. Is it that I am just the best cook in town? Probably not, I’m good but not that good. The problem is the ingredients. They sicken me, they are sickening, the world is sick and getting sicker.
You know those fun hibachi type restaurants with the grill and the chef and the flaming onion? Often the place for a birthday group, I went with a friend one evening. I was starved, parched, and guzzled a peach lemonade. It was spectacular. I ordered a second one, drank half, and passed out.
There were six strangers at that table that night, and when I came to, the looks on their faces was priceless. I ran out of there embarrassed and pale as a ghost, the blood still not back in my face. Looking back now, I know that the lemonades were minute maid, and sweetened with high fructose peach syrup. Which has a little known side effect of rapidly dropping a person’s blood pressure.
What I am getting at is this - we have to change our food systems from the ground up. It’s time to take back our power and run our own food systems. Small time farms can produce enough to keep us going, if we build enough of them and keep them thriving with business.
I can’t keep eating chemicals, and I can’t watch others do it too. I stood in the grocery store today, blankly staring at my basket, lemons, avocados, bananas, mushrooms, cabbage. And a bar of cashew chocolate. One of two brands I could find that didn’t have the four horsemen of ingredients I started this rant with. And they’re actually pretty dang tasty.
Slightly dazed by my grocery store ingredient revelation, I brought my eyes back into the room, and noticed the people around me. A old man went slowly by, bent over and pushing hard, his cart laden with cases and cases of p*psi. He stopped to grab a bag of d*ritos, looked at it and threw it on top of the soda.
My only thought was “that’s going to kill him” and I don’t think that is too much of an exaggeration. I think we are pretty fucked here people, and it is time to wake the fuck up. Food needs us to save it, before it fails to save us. I’m tired of passing out if I eat what should be a comforting drink or meal. That isn’t right. My doctors and dozens of tests have proved I am 100% healthy. But my gut is wrecked. Ruined by the trash we call food. I am over it, pissed off and ready for change.
We used to have real ingredients in products… I remember things from my childhood tasted far far better back then. And I am quite sure that isn’t just some psychological trick, it really was better. Because we didn’t use chemicals in every single thing.
Where did our food go? Let’s get it back. I’m hungry for a meal that doesn’t hurt me.
