 Toxins.
Chemicals. Artificial additives. Trans and saturated fats. Sugars.
Salt. Genetically manufactured ingredients. Preservatives. Hormones.
Pesticides. Herbicides. Cholesterol.
It's hard to find foods
that are free from this crap. Packaged, processed, and 'fast' foods are
replete with them. Big Agribusiness makes its living by dumping all
this junk in our food to make it cheaper to produce, better-looking or
more addictive. So what can we do?
Ideally, we should buy all
our food ingredients from local organic farmers (or grow our own). If
that's possible, and affordable for you, then you've got lots of
choice, and you can stop reading this article.
For the rest of
us, it's a real challenge. I won't get into the debate over whether it
is natural or healthy to eat meat (humans have evolved, in different
times and places, to be pure vegetarians, almost exclusively
carnivores, and omnivores) --
but most factory-farmed meats are a toxic soup of chemical additives
designed to make the animal fatter faster, antibiotics, hormones,
pesticides, herbicides and other poisons. Fish from the sewers that we
have turned our rivers, lakes and oceans into are often so dangerous
children and pregnant women are forbidden to eat them. Most processed
and packaged foods, and the garbage we get from fast-food restaurants,
are full of chemicals, trans fats and other artificial and adulterated
ingredients that have never been proved safe and are suspects in a host
of diseases.
These processed foods also contain massive amounts
of sugars: North Americans consume an average of nearly 140 pounds of
sugars per year, half of it in sugared drinks, and ten times what our
ancestors consumed a century ago. We're addicted to it. And the
Monsanto sugar substitute monopoly is ratcheting up our consumption at
a dizzying rate, deepening our addiction and poisoning us with
dangerous manufactured chemicals. Our salt consumption is tracking a
similar dizzying upward curve. In most countries not only are
genetically manufactured ingredients present in almost everything we
eat, they're not even labeled as such. The 'accidental' ingredients
left over from chemical treatment of foods and from processing are
likewise not on the label.
Even our fruits and vegetables are
washed in poisoned water, soaked in artificial pesticides, herbicides
and preservatives, and grown in depleted, nutritionally dead soil on
which we've dumped ever-increasing amounts of chemical fertilizers.
Even many of our favourite teas, coffees and alcoholic beverages
contain harmful and unhealthy ingredients. And other favourite foods
are replete with cholesterol.
Despite this, there are still lots of good things to eat, if you use your imagination and can get past your addictions. The key ingredients
are organic, whenever possible locally-grown (because a lot of food
value is lost in long-distance transportation and related preservation
processes): fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, herbs, spices, beans and whole grains.
These ingredients can be combined, without much effort, into:
- salads
- raw side dishes (with or without sauces, seasonings, dips and dressings from these same ingredients)
- meat and dairy substitutes (e.g. soy protein)
- soups
- juices
- smoothies
- high-omega, unsaturated oils
- natural low-calorie sweeteners (e.g. stevia)
- spreads (e.g. peanut butter, sugarless jams)
- teas
- animal-fat cooking substitutes (e.g. applesauce)
- healthy breads (e.g. oat, flax, quinoa)
The keys to making eating only such foods delicious are
- getting past our snobbery about simple raw foods (who says everything needs to be cooked, chilled or mixed with a dozen other ingredients?),
- getting a lot of variety in our diet and the ingredients we use, and
- as a result, achieving a good balance of macro- and micro-nutrients in our diet.
So
even if we don't have a variety of organic farms and gardens handy (or
in our own yards), we can still eat healthy, and, by avoiding the
processed foods and buying raw in bulk, save money as well. The pride
of self-mastering another useful skill (healthy gourmet cooking), the
satisfaction of reducing animal cruelty and the irresponsible
Agri-golopy's hold over our lives, and the pleasure of eating yummy
meals, are just the (stevia-sweetened) icing on the (carrot, spice and
whole grain flour) cake.
Mmmm!
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
