Monday, April 4, 2011

Is America Starting to Devour its Young?

I read an interesting article in the New York Times yesterday relating to the importance of color in food, how it draws us, how it appeals to our taste buds, how something colorful can make us hungry in a different way than say, a bowl of vanilla ice cream makes us hungry.

This article was interesting to me because I have an autoimmune disorder, and the worst and most painful symptoms are generally triggered whenever I've ingested something with red, blue or yellow food dyes.  If it were only that simple, but food additives, preservatives and chemicals also put me over the edge health wise.

I thought about my own response to food.  The items in the bakery with the most color always attract me and make me want to eat them.  Cheetos would NOT be the same if they weren't bright orange and didn't leave orange residue all over your fingers.  Color plays a big part in how appetizing foods are.

I started thinking about what I ate as a kid, growing up in the fifties and sixties.  We had chips and dips.  Mixed nuts.  Custard stands.  Root Beer.  Great gobs of penny candy which had to be the most colorful thing we ingested.  Sugary birthday cakes from the bakery were normal, but hey - once a year, why not?

I started to think about the kids in my elementary school class.  There were kids who might have gone to special reading classes.  Kids who weren't as quick on the intellectual uptake as I was.  Even kids who really did seem, well, pretty stupid.  But we didn't have Aspergers and Autism and ADHD. (Mind you, I'm only starting on the A's.)  We didn't have kids leaving class to go take psychiatric medications from the school nurse.  I can't help but believe we had better diets in those days.  Even me.  And my mom was not the best cook.

America today is a convenience-based society.  For the most part, parents are simply too busy because both of them work to provide for their families (or their families more materialistic desires) depending on where they are on the socio-economic ladder.  Add taking care of a house, doing laundry, keeping up with the neighbors and carting the kids around to activities, and preparing wholesome meals just has to fly out the window.  Preparing a wholesome meal takes at least an hour.  Add shopping for ingredients and doing the prep work, and you're up to two hours.  Don't forget about cleaning up.  Chicken nuggets might seem like a rational alternative.  But are they?  What chemicals are your kids ingesting along with those nuggets.

Are we poisoning our children?  Have we been poisoning them all along?  I know that for the sake of convenience, we have poisoned our air (carbon monoxide emissions from every family having at least two, and usually more cars).  We have poisoned our water (all that plastic convenience produces waste products which the manufacturers have to put somewhere).  The water seems like a valid dumping ground to the manufacturer. 

Do we start poisoning our children while they are still in the womb?  I know I craved Hostess Suzie Q's when I was pregnant and ate them every single day.  I shudder to think what the label of a Hostess Suzie Q reads like.

Is it possible that all the growth hormones we put in milk and meat destroy our children's brains?  Do the pesticides that keep the bugs off corn and wheat actually rot our children from the inside? Wouldn't eating a bug be better? Is the food supply really safe in America?  Nothing is safe in an America where profit is the one true God we consistently worship. 

I eat organic.  I have to.  I'm very lucky I can afford to. 

I believe America is destroying its children and that Americans are blind to how they are doing this because the convenience they've come to rely on, depend on, build their lives around is far more important to them than doing intelligent things regarding raising their offspring. 

There's a reason there are so many fertility problems here in America.  There's a reason why so many kids have a psychiatric diagnosis.  I think this nation has begun to eat its young.  I think its time for a real rethink on what we're doing here because what we're doing here is hideous and speaks of future disaster.

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