Eating In The Modern Age
Is anyone else out there FREAKING OUT about food?
It is bloody exhausting, all these things we're supposed to worry about at dinnertime. Everytime you pick up a magazine or flick on the telly, there's a new report about something else we should or should not be eating.
We are all drowning in food information, scare stories and buzzwords. Antioxidants, superfoods, free range, fair trade, arrgh! A trip to the supermarket is now a stressful ordeal of label reading and moral dilemmas.
I dunno about you, but I'm conflicted and confused.
Not only do I need to eat healthy foods to lose weight, I need to eat the really healthy foods, the ones they say can ward off heart disease, diabetes, crappy livers, dry skin, bad breath and cancer.
I've banned the trans fat, cut down the sat fat, because I need to eat low fat, but I can't forget the good fat!
Such as omega-3s. As seen in salmon and tuna. As long as they're not farmed or full of mercury or over-fished. I don't want to eat endangered fishes. I love sushi but every bite gives me guilty nightmares.
I need more whole grains but they need to be real whole grains, not the Bullshit Whole Grains like Nestle are trying to convince me are contained in a box of Cheerios.
I've subtracted additives.
I'm avoiding corn syrup and all things partially inverted. Plus sucrose fructose maltrose dextrose pantyhose, anything ending with -ose.
I'm don't eat any animals that were cooped up in small places.
I avoid processed foods. Although I do eat Quorn sausages now and then. Is it more noble to eat a processed vegetarian sausage instead of a processed "meat" one consisting of ground-up snouts, trotters and rusk?
Am I getting enough protein?
I try to buy organic produce, but if it's organic and shipped from Peru, is the organic smugness cancelled out by all the air it pollutes en route to the UK?
But if I don't buy the Peruvian organics, will the poor Peruvian economy suffer? Then again, what about my poor local farmer? Does one Buy Organic or Buy Local?!
And chocolate. I know I should choose the antioxidantal 70% Organic Dark made from fairly-traded cocoa beans, but what if my body is screaming out for a shitey old Mars Bar? Will I be struck down by a bus in punishment?
Sometimes I feel like I can't even just simply unpeel a freaking banana these days before I've sent it a lab for nutritional analysis, traced its lineage for seven generations, then personally met the farmer who planted it.
It's almost enough to put me off my food. Almost.