Thoughts on food and eating....

So I was reading Mark Bittman's column this morning, on McDonald's oatmeal, and one of the comments really got me thinking, and thinking back to when I visited Paris.

Here's the page for the comment

Lets see if I can copy and paste the comment itself:

hmmm, doesn't look like it. Grrr.

Anyway, in a nutshell, the gentleman in question apparently spent three hours trying to find out why the Newman's Own salad dressing at MCD's HAS corn syrup, where the grocery store version does not.

And really, this, to me, exemplifies what has happened to the eating patterns of our country.

Not only is everything highly sweetened, most of it has corn syrup. Whereas in Europe, most things do not. There's also freshness, and fads.

Even with all this produce being trucked in every day, food isn't fresh. I've had some foods stay ;fresh' in the fridge for months (which, yes, says something about my housekeeping, but I digress). I know I can taste the difference between organic and not, and my fruit intake does suffer in the winter, because there is less organic fruit in the market. There is a real difference with fresh food, with fewer chemicals...

I've been reading a weight-loss blog where she has lost over a hundred pounds. Fabulous! But right now she is sick. She is using Medifast, which is a lot of chemicals, and I start wondering if she is really getting healthy. Its a little scary reading her blog, because she talks about being addicted to food, and binge eating. And guess what? Its the chemicals and fat and sugar that they put in the foods. The artificial flavors, etc. One post she wrote that was incredibly telling to me was that she binges looking for a 'taste memory' for something to taste as good as she remembers....

That to me says that all these 'natural flavors' they are using, yes, even in some organic products, are addictive. And it worries me.

No, I'm not skinny, but you know what? I'm losing weight doing the CSA, because its fresh. Because I have to come up with soups and stuff to use the produce, and that gets me eating healthier.

And I use sugar and honey. But now I'm scared because I read in an earlier piece by Bittman that, apparently, one of the things they have been doing genetic engineering on is sugar beets. To me, that says that the industry said "ok, people want sugar, not corn syrup, how do we go about creating sugar as cheaply as corn syrup, so that we can load up the foods with sugar?".

Unfortunately, I do buy packaged bread, because of my food allergy, but other than that, I try to stay away from junky foods... I just remember being struck by how much the food in Europe is better. How the same products that have corn syrup here don't there.

And the people who end up eating at McD's, the ones who do because its cheap and they only have a limited income... they are the ones who really need a healthful option. And oatmeal-flavored sugar is not a healthy option. There has to be a limit, a control, and we have to get big Agribusiness out of our government.... If they just want to make money, fine, but lets stop subsidizing them on our tax dollars...