Food notes

As my husband knows, I am obsessed with reading labels, particularly when shopping for food. I want to know what I am eating, how it is processed, so I can not buy items laced with salt and high fructose corn syrup, and chemicals I can't even pronounce. One of my personal rules, if I can't pronounce it, I can't eat it.

So, in thinking about food, isn't it odd that although we want to promote buying American with cars or clothes, but almost never with food? We want imported italian tomatoes, pasta, olive oil, swiss chocolate, french fries or toast, but do we really want American cheese - that processed tasteless mess? As American as apple pie?

The reality is that most American food is not good, it is over processed, loaded with salt and sugar, sprayed with chemicals and essentially awful.

Put side by side organic apples or cherries versus commercially process fruits and there is no comparison. But in traveling to europe there is no question that the food tastes better, unprocessed, tastier, easier to digest. So here, I don't even eat certain foods anymore, especially wheat because I can't digest it. Beef because it is so laced with antibiotics and because the cattle is fed other cattle when cows are supposed to be herbivores, our food system is a mess.

We as a culture are so divorced from the sources of our food, we just want it ready to eat and not to think about it too much. It can't last and won't last as our environment collapses around us. I guess Donald Trump will believe in climate change when it is too late.