There is a strange taste in my mouth and I do not know where it is coming from. Can you find it in this picture?
Today I went to the office to work for the first time since I got sick. There was a cute bag of easter chocolate on a desk in the common area, gifted from someone who had more power than all of the inhabitants of the room. We thought we were lucky. I was particularly happy because they were perfectly sized for my bento, so I brought some home. But then something made me think again about whether I was really really lucky. You’ll see why if you have the patience to read all of this post.
It was a particularly long day for me. When I came home, I almost decided not to eat dinner and just go to bed. However, I had to do something for lunch tomorrow. This sounds funny for people who are not lunch-box crazy, but: because I needed to make a lunch-box, I made dinner. For the non frequent readers of the blog I have to reiterate: lunch is the main meal of my day, then breakfast comes. Dinner is never special, unless it is an intentionally special dinner: a date, a celebration, a self gifting ritual after a deadline. Most of the days my dinner is leftovers of my lunch-box for the next day, or scrambled eggs, quick salad, something like that.
Since I gave myself only fifteen minutes to prepare the lunch, I decided to make a version of zaru soba. I boiled some water, put a bunch of soba noodles, and added some tofu that I’d previously frozen a minute before the soba was done (note to self: freezing leftover tofu wasn’t a bad idea). Meanwhile, I chopped some cucumber, reconstituted wakame with some water and made a quick sauce out of soy sauce, hot pepper flakes, rice vinegar, ginger powder and sesame oil. Mixed soba+tofu with wakame and cucumbers and I was almost done. I put some sauce in a container rather than pouring it over all of the noodles to prevent leakage during transportation. I poured the rest on the portion I reserved for dinner. I was done. Good thing I washed some strawberries this morning. They were 2.50 per pound; and for that price during March I could ignore that they drove all the way from California. Please tell me, if you’d like to eat fresh fruit in Midwest when nothing is in season, what else can you do? A piece of Babybel cheese, and all I was missing was some kind of treat. I looked at the cream eggs that I brought from the office and asked “Why not”. I’ll tell why you should not.
I do not consider myself a food snob, but I can say that my preferences are skewed towards what most Americans consider snobbish. I don’t look down on people who eat food that I consider inferior; but yes I consider a lot of food, or better yet “industrial food products”, inferior. I do not pick food for its symbolic value, nor for its price, rarity or which part of the world it comes from; and I try not to make friends with people who do so. I have a particular aversion towards the gourmet culture which overlooks majority of the third world food culture (Have you ever tried searching biryani at Epicurious? Try it, please!), and undermines the real heroes of the food industry. Still I sound elitist every time I open my mouth about food. People hate me, they have even systematically harassed me in the past in other mediums. Perhaps because I tell the inconvenient truth?
I try not to act like an elitist asshole, but sometimes it just happens. Especially when it comes to processed food, factory produced “food products” and anything that is designed to resemble something other than itself. I gag when I see the ingredients of most standard grocery store items, and I haven’t eaten at a McDo since 2001. Yada yada, standard food snob bitching. Middle class abstraction process that prohibits a real understanding of the Kraft blue box subaltern. Bla bla.
I am sorry, this will sound another self righteous bull-crap but, I think if I had only 50 dollars per month for food, I would still not eat the blue box. In fact I think it could be an expensive way to eat. Rice, bulgur, beans and pasta cost around a dollar per pound, sometimes less depending on where you shop. Eggs tend to be cheap as well. Of course I would have to forgo fruit, fish and vegetables most of my days, which is a luxury that I take for granted with my current budget. Still, I believe that the real problem lies in the perceptions and accessibility regarding food. Most of the preferences of Americans below poverty are unfortunately learned preferences, class conditioned dispositions; more importantly, such dispositions directly harm them. And again, unfortunately, they are also stripped from the information that helps them to get out of those learned dispositions. As elitist as this might sound, most people don’t know any better and have no consciousness of their options. So yeah, you are right that I have no authority to talk about the subaltern, because I have power and agency; I can chose and I can decide. A lot of people can’t. They are stripped from knowledge, power and agency. They are alienated, they are dictated to think that the blue box is their only option and that there is no harm in eating it every day. Do you also know that poorer urban neighborhood grocery stores sell lower quality produce sold at a higher price because none of the big stores with cost advantage find it profitable to open a store in the area? Do you also know that less healthy food options are more heavily promoted in poorer non-white neighborhoods? But what about the blinded suburban kids with SUVs and their moms who have a weekly food budget that equals my monthly stipend? Why do they think you care about them when they are handed something that contains Yellow#6?
In addition to “demystifying brown bagging”, I intend to use this blog not only to inform people about the amount of unnatural stuff in their food, but also to monitor, track and improve my own eating. I might even sound hypocritical in this post, since frequent readers of this blog also might recall that I use lots of convenience items (Trader Ho anyone?). Well because it is a learned disposition. I do possess those dispositions, unfortunately. A year from now, and hopefully done with school, I hope to eliminate all things processed; for now, leave me be an hypocritical asshole. The thing is, mainstream ideology regarding what we put in our bodies, especially the one dominant in the USA, is so messed up that sometimes there is no way to escape. What are you going to do when your school cafeteria serves meat which is actually a sort of “meat product” (a.k.a meat with lots of synthetic fillers and preservatives). Do you have to shop at Wholefoods to avoid high fructose corn syrup? Why do I have to defend myself every time I refuse to take a painkiller for a headache? To avoid eating nuclear weapon grade materials, you really have to become an obsessive compulsive person who reads all ingredient labels; or if you have time and motivation to make everything from scratch, just ignore anything that is packaged. I don’t; I have successfully convinced myself that I can’t.
Now, the chocolate easter eggs. The first thing that I sensed when I put this egg shaped food product was an unpleasant sense of sweetness. There it was, the ubiquitous corn syrup. There was also something cold and metalic, think about licking a piece of steel. But that sugar, it was overwhelming. Then I remembered, sometime in last century per capita consumption of sugar hit 150 pounds (pdf file), per year. I don’t know how big or small you are, but this is basically equal to the number on my scale. I can even imagine a pile of sugar that is 150 pounds. In fact, I am pretty sure tonight’s nightmare will be a giant monster made out of sugar, running after me, shouting “I will catch you and make you diabetic”.
Anyhoo, no wonder we all became sugar junkies; we were sinisterly fed it. But I wasn’t, or more appropriately I had gone cold turkey. Since I was watching my sugar intake for the last six months, the taste of the cream egg, a favorite product of many, was disgustingly sweet. It was also too chemical. By saying this I will probably offend millions who like this product but honestly it tasted like aluminum foil and burnt sugar. So I wondered what it was that contributed to this impeccable taste? What tasted so chemical that I can still feel it in my mouth 2 hours after dinner? Unfortunately, Hershey’s web site didn’t list the ingredients for the said product. Instead they said:
Nutrition information for this flavor is not available online at this time. Please consult the package label or call us at (800) 468-1714 for further information.
I almost called them, but I was suddenly lazy and tired and kind of foggy minded. Then I realized, there was probably some form of corn syrup in that thing. I rarely show this kind of reaction towards real chocolate; but how much chocolate was in this chocolate? Quickly, my blood sugar rose, then my insulin; suddenly I felt like fainting. Perhaps my insulin hit 200?. Yay, bullseye! “They should use this product instead of that flat orange soda thing that they force feed me every time I get a glucose intolerance test”, I said to myself. How many of these would you need to supply 75 mgs of glucose? I still needed some answers, but nutritional info was not available.
Instead of driving to the nearest convenience store and checking the labels, I decided to to try my chance with google. The closest information I got was this, which shows a portion of the nutritional labeling. Corn syrup? Present! Unidentified artificial flavorings? Present! Rest was cropped from the picture. Thank you dear senior departmental person who gave me this. You must really dislike me, or that, like millions of Americans, you are truly blinded by the agro-industrial complex.
America wake up! They are feeding you crap. And because it is so cheap, you look the other way. When one pound of oreos cost less than a pound of fruit, there is something wrong.
