A few years ago I read a book review in Maclean's magazine of Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice. I only needed to read the article to be forever turned off of store-bought orange juice. Nothing kills your love of "fresh" orange juice faster than the thought of it being stored in a tank for several months, and then having a flavour packet added to it before it is packaged and shipped to you. Plus I had an epiphany—real fresh squeezed orange juice tastes NOTHING like store bought orange juice. The difference in taste is astounding. I'd been ignoring the obvious. Possibly, I'd been sold a bill of goods.
Ever since then, I've either bought real fresh squeezed from our market (hard on my wallet) or squeezed it myself (time-consuming), which has resulted in a dramatic drop in orange juice consumption in our house, which frankly is probably for the best. From what I'm told, we shouldn't be drinking juice in massive quantities like that anyway.
Then in the last week or so, it came to light that a fungicide being used on Brazilian oranges was ending up in our orange juice. I wasn't worried because frankly I stopped drinking it anyway, but it reminded me, yet again, what a messy business eating has become.
Gone are the days of my grandmother, where three squares were all you needed. Now you need to have several smaller portions through the day. Or wait, is it a smoothie for breakfast and lunch and then actual food? No, no, you should eat less meat, more fish. But wait, watch the fish with high mercury levels. That stuff will kill you. So eat farmed fish. It's sustainable, bred in clean water. That's they way to go, right? Not so fast. They're feeding it corn. I don't remember ever seeing a corn field in the ocean. Also, our over-consumption of corn products is making us fat. Don't get me started on chickens that can't walk because of overly enlarged breasts and cows fed corn, not grass.
What's a mom to do? Well, of course, you buy organic right? Wrong. Because it would seem that organic is a little bit of a con too. Apparently, some of those organic farmers are possibly just jumping on the "organic" gravy train and not really living the life. So, how do I know that the strawberries I just paid an extra three dollars for are really better for my kids health than the non-organic version right beside them. We watch movies like Food Inc. and Super Size Me and we are disgusted and run hysterically from processed food. Then we hear stories of people getting sick and dying from eating fresh fruit. Wait? What? That's supposed to be good for you though?
Then there's the sugar conundrum. We need to cut our consumption of refined sugar. But sugar is sugar. So the white granulated stuff is apparently no worse than the sugar found in fruit juices or honey. If you want you can live a sugar-free life, but I'm not going to, ok?
Then there's the elephant in the room. What food did I eat today that is going to bring that ugly "C" word into my life? Did I feed my kids a time bomb today?
I feel like I've become a pinball, being tossed about from data to news stories to personal accounts of all things wrong with our food.
I made Roasted Chickpeas the other day and felt pretty good about it. That's a healthy snack, right? That is until I started to question if I should have used organic chickpeas. And what about the BPA lining the can? Then I spent an hour consumed with guilt that I just fed my kids toxic chickpeas. Jeezus murphy, I'm a lunatic. (sidenote: they are really really good chickpeas, totally ignore my rant here)
Finally, don't think that the irony of all this is lost on me. That while I fret and worry about what's in our food, there's a large portion of mankind that worries about eating at all.
Where am I going with all this? I don't know. It's a rant really. I'm confused and I'm overwhelmed with food information, and I guess I'm just wondering, if you are too?
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