children of the corn syrup

it is possible:
1. that i'm now an old fogey
2. i think too hard while grocery shopping
3. food inc. and king corn are some scary-ass documentaries
4. it's all derek's fault

well, derek has given up soda and i bought him a new kitchen gadget to make super fizzy water at home to mix with juice. (izze is just too expensive!) we've gone to buying local meat at the meat market and concentrating on eating more and more of what one could call real food.

it's really not that dramatic of an adjustment. we've been going to harvard meats for a while off and on. eating more veggies and cooking at home more often kind of started when i began my nesting phase a while back. the no mountain dew thing for him is new, but i am trying to be supportive by only getting my diet dr. peppers when i go out. it's an addiction, i know, but i'm a pepper. wouldn't you like to be a pepper, too? hell yes!!! i HAVE to be a fucking pepper! "they" made me into a pepper when i was a kid, and i'm not stopping now. must! be! PEPPER!!!

see how that works? high fructose corn syrup must have been the impending doom epidemic of the twentieth century. dr. tony was chatting with me a few weeks ago (also in reference to food inc. - don't know if he's seen king corn) and made a passing comment that diabetes is the new black plague. that stuck with me as i was watching the "eat actual food" docs of the last month and hearing michael pollan's name an unusual number of times. to hear it told by these people, HFCS is the devil... not to mention all of the other corn-derivative products used in food production processes and as feed for slaughter animals. now corn is not be the root of all evil, and it probably didn't even make me into a pepper, but you know what? there sure is a lot of fucking corn out there. it's in a lot of stuff.

this probably doesn't mean i'll give up the occasional bag of blueberry muffin tops cereal, because who can give up crazy shit like that? (yes, i'm not kidding - it really does exist!) i probably won't even give up any other icky HFCS convenience junk food that i want on occasion. being the pepper that i am, i'll always want a burrito or some pudding to tide me over in times of craving. however, we do try to eat actual food around here. if that means reading labels and thinking about packaging and figuring out how to be informed to the hilt about things i really don't want to know, so be it. nobody said being a pepper was easy.

but i don't think the doctor would recruit me into his vast army of tasty liquid minions without expecting me to cram in the spinach, too. he is, after all, a doctor. he wouldn't want us to exist on his crack and heroin filled soda alone. that's why he kept in a few natural flavorings, don't you know. now he should prolly think about capitalizing on this whole "organic panic" craze by going back to cane sugar as a sales ploy. just think of all the peppers he would gain! our growing numbers could then spread the word that olive oil is not the enemy. we would reinstate good carbs to their rightful place in the world. maybe, just maybe, we could make the federal school lunch program get the funding to include things that didn't involve some unidentified food byproduct being boiled to greyish, soupy goop amongst a sea of abbreviated additives.

they say that if you can neither spell nor say the ingredients on your food, you most likely shouldn't be eating it. i can go with that theory. then again, i'm a pretty good speller, but you can bet the doctor would agree with this advice. and besides, our nations' children can't even tell where to put punctuation, so it's a decent enough rule to stick with until we can start funding education again... maybe the peppers of us out there can work on that next.


postal goodies:
urban craft uprising package from bonnie! EEE!