The American grocery store, or supermarket as they are sometimes called, is a thing of freakish wonder to begin with. The sheer volume of goods, most of it not real food, is astounding and frightening. The latest trend are the gourmet grocery stores like Fresh Fields and Trader Joe’s. They have aisles of packaged goods marked organic or vegan with a new list of ingredients you’ve never heard of. National soda brands are gone, but there are plenty of fruit juices that will rot your teeth just the same, and are made by the national brands. It’s all a facade.
Lots of women wearing lululemon yoga pants pushing their tiny carts, with bags of seaweed flavored snack crisps and fizzy fruit juice. It’s all just chips and soda dear.
A lot of the food we’re sold isn’t even what they say it is. Seafood is regularly sold as something it’s not. Fake crab meat. Fake lobster. While seafood fraud encompasses any illegal activity that misrepresents the fish you purchase, including mislabeling and falsifying documents, to adding too much ice to packaging, Oceana’s focus is on seafood substitution. From 2010 to 2012, Oceana conducted one of the largest seafood fraud investigations in the world to date, collecting more than 1,200 samples from 674 retail outlets in 21 states to determine if they were honestly labeled. DNA testing found that one-third, or 33 percent, of the 1,215 seafood samples were mislabeled, according to U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidelines.
At least they’re making an effort, and everything isn’t bad. At least they have a nice variety of produce and raw foods. That’s a start. I’m not sure how much I buy the organic argument. I think we could all use a lot pesticides and petroleum-based fertilizers on the planet, but I believe this shit is organic in the same way I believe they’re actually doing something useful with the plastic I throw in the blue bin.
With that said, it’s harder and more expensive to food that hasn’t been processed beyond anything recognizable as the mixture of the ingredients.
I was watching a little television on Sunday. I wasn’t feeling well because I’m fasting. [You can make fun of that later if you like, but that’s a different subject.] The amount of commercials for disgusting processed foods is mind boggling. It usually involves some sort of crusty cheesy thing that you just know you’d have to shit out before the commercial was over.
Pizza hut, always the innovator of pizza that doesn’t resemble food is pitching a pizza where the crust around the edge is stuffed with cheese and bacon. Now I love pizza, cheese and bacon. But no one needs 3100 calories at a sitting. That’s just wrong.
What’s truly scary about our fast food nation is that we’ve completely devalued food. We think a cheeseburger should cost the same as it did in 1969. In 2016 there is no way we should be offering a $1 menu. Our food is too cheap. Our medicine is too expensive. Our healthcare sucks.
We’ve sold our souls, not to the Devil, but to Pepsico.
