The Good Old Days of Food and Sanity

By TRB

Finally we can say there were good old days. For the longest time in my life, I have heard "good old days," talked about. But someone was always quick to point out that they were not good old days at all. There was no television, that computers did not exist, that cars were poorly made, that most people could not afford to purchase a house and lived in apartments, that hardly anyone went to college folllowing high school, that medicine was in the Dark Ages and that many died of preventable illnesses, and on and on.

But that has finally changed. Changed completely. There are good old days in back of us now. We have begun to sink as a society, to not quite make it up to our own standards. And the proof of this is in every direction you look. Forget that the life expectancy rates are dropping and that infant mortality has increased. And don't even bother to bring up that it is easier to die in a hospital of some exotic infection than it is if you were to blindfold yourself and go walking in traffic. The crime rate is staggering, the job market is dead, the price of an education is beyond the means of most people. But, for a moment, let's forget about all that blather.

Just walk into any supermarket. Look closely at the food. All of it, the meat, the greens, the milk, the bread, the staples as we used to call them. What in the world do all these labels on them mean? Some are organically grown, but only 70 percent organic. Who knows how they grow the other 30 percent of the same vegetable? Farmers have become quite knowledgable about antibiotics and growth hormones and preservatives and anti-pest preventatives, and even genetic engineering.

I don't know that they have learned that much more about food, except how to make it very unfood like. Some of this stuff might be downright dangerous. The Food and Drug Administration, who couldn't be trusted to deliver your groceries on time, has decided to allow farmers to do just about anything to our food. And they have. Now when you eat a piece of chicken, you are also digesting something that has been shot full of growth hormones and antibiotics, and in many cases has been eating food laced with chicken. That's right, you are eating a doped up, cannibalistic chicken.

Same goes for your red meat. Again, you are eating something that is the product of men who have done everything they could, both chemically and with antibiotics to get an edge on their compitition. Are you beginning to remember the good old days yet?

They still exist. They are alive and growing and kicking and strutting around the yard like they own it - locally. Today you can drive right past the food market, which has become the Land of Cancer Chemicals - and go to your local green grocer. This will cost you more, expecially off season. But you can be assured that you are eating a chicken when you are eating a chicken and that your beans have not been "genetically altered."

Can you believe they got that past the FDA? Now the large corporate farms are genetically altering your veggies. They have absolutely no idea of the long term consequences, because they haven't been doing it long enough. Will these altered genes mess up your digestive system, for example. They will certainly be new to your digestive system which is used to good old veggies with all the right genes.

So how can you avoid all of this if you want to go to a supermarket? First you have to buy organically grown food. Check with your grocer for the foods that are 100 percent organically grown, because they don't have to be 100 percent to use the word "organic." Be very careful of fish, especially salmon, which in some nations is considered the most poisoned food you can buy. Farm grown salmon got it all, a genetic heratige that has been skewered by man, antibiotics , growth hormones. Even their feed is questionsble. Go ahead ask them for a straight answer on that one.

And now other fish are being prepared for the farm. Don't be surprised to see farm grown flounder or cod, or even larger fish in the future. Beef is alrerady a mess. You can't believe what they tell you half the time about its origins or what they have done to it. Many have stopped eating it completely. Of course the worst meat you can buy is in your fast food hamburger. It is difficult to even call it "meat" with a straight face.

There were good old days for food though. And I am old enough to remember them. I remember the milk being dropped off by the milkman every morning. The Cushman's bakery truck would come by and leave pastries. I would always go for the chocolate milk. This was when there was actually wax at the mouth of the bottle to keep it from spilling. I can remember the dairy farm where our milk, chicken and eggs came from was right down the road and I knew the people who owned it. They're gone, like most small farms who just couldn't make it when the corporations began buying up farmland, creating corporate farms.

Those were good old days before they came around.

And there were good old days when your could go to UMass Amherst or UMass Boston for very little money. It is not like that anymore. It is very expensive now. I remember when Harvard University was $2400 a semester. Now, it's over $20,000, maybe about $50,000 a year or more.There was a time not too long ago when there were not as many babies with chronic nervous system or brain diseases as there are now. Is this because of all the chemicals in our environment, chemicals that can not be cleaned up?

Why are people dying younger? Why are less babies surviving birth? Does anyone know?

Now someone is going to say, what about the progress that has been made in African American rights and women's rights? To that I reply. That was already begining to happen 25-30 years ago. In fact, even before then when LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act.

And to top it all off, we, those who can remember a time that can accurately be called "the good old days," have never seen forclosure rates like this, a million families a year losing their homes, unemployment so bad that all of us know many people who don't have jobs or a chance of finding one. And we have politicians who are probably the most corrupt to sit in Congress in more than a century.

They are stealing us blind, and they are laughing all the way to the bank, which itself is having a good time laughing at how easy it is to rip you off.