Thursday, October 7, 2010

Contract or no, I will not bow to any sponsor

I love this line from Wayne's World: Contract or no, I will not bow to any sponsor.

In my case, I won't bow down to "just any food sponsor." My whole food history has been built on eating whole, healthy foods, ditching the processed stuff and cooking 99.9% of what we eat from scratch. I admit, I don't raise goats or cows or chickens and have to purchase milk, cheese, eggs and meat. But I choose my products wisely.

When food corporations come calling, I often have to decline to promote their products for many reasons:

1. I can't eat what they make because of my food allergies
2. I don't want to eat what they make, even if I didn't have food allergies
3. I can't ask other people to eat what I would never eat despite the money I'm offered

Oh, the money; good Lord, the money. I've passed on a lot of great opportunities on the basis of good eating morals.

I get angry at the thought of these companies selling food to the public; food that is full of chemicals, fillers, stabilizers deemed "natural" that are so far from natural it should be illegal to use the word "natural."

I get angry at the enormous amounts of marketing and advertising dollars that get dumped into promoting these products. I get angry at the government for allowing this to happen to us and to food. I get angry at people for falling for it all, for not knowing more about what they're eating, for not caring, and for being lazy about food. Really, how difficult is it to read a label and realize you can't pronounce half of the ingredients and then realize you shouldn't eat it?

Restaurants fall into this category, too. Fast food, chains, even upscale chains and some independent restaurants rely on processed foods. I don't eat out very often, and when I do, it's at one of three restaurants who make everything they serve from scratch, or source local artisans for from-scratch, slow foods.

And this trickles down into anyone promoting these non-food items, be it cookbooks, magazines, newspapers, web sites or bloggers.

So continue on, go out there and promote the hell out of ferrous sulfate, soy protein isolate, sodium phosphate, ascorbyl palmitate, tocopherol, natural flavor (which is typically man-made glutamate), retinol palmitate, maltodextrin, modified cornstarch, disodium inosinate disodium guanylate, and the hundreds of other ingredients we can't pronounce. You're doing a great job at killing us all off!

When my daughter gets upset over the tube of Pilsbury cookie dough or cinnamon rolls I won't buy, I tell her this:
Don't worry honey, when you're 35, most of your friends will have heart disease, diabetes or cancer. You'll be the only healthy one left. While they're in hospitals, you'll go to Washington and write the food regulation and health care bills that will eventually save their lives.

If any organic food companies or grass roots organizations need a food/chef spokesperson, let me know. I'm available!

P.S. The ingredients mentioned above were pulled from Progresso, Weight Watchers and Healthy Choice foods; canned and frozen.

P.P.S. I color my hair with chemicals. I never said I was perfect.

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