September 05, 2003
preservatives
So I live in hippie-town USA. It's certainly one of the hippie-towns. You can still see rainbow painted VW buses. Barefoot people are commonly spotted. A little whiff of marijuana can be detected every now and then. People live in communes. Yes! More than one commune is here.
One of the women from my class yesterday is in one. She's really nice. Her group stands for creating economic justice throughout the world. I wonder if some of them will be going to Cancun for the WTO meeting. I'd give odds that they are.
What this all means, as far as relevance to me, is that there's plenty of hippie-food to go around. All kinds of vegetarian nonsense. There's the really dedicated to vegetarianism kind of food like textured vegetable protein and seitan and many millions of kinds of kelp, seaweed, and marine bits. Then there's the semi-dedicated stuff like tofu and chocolate-flavored soy milk and non-animal tested bath products. The final vegetarian category is the kind of "just getting my toes wet" variety. Pizza without pepperoni, a turkey sandwich instead of a huge hamburger, veggie Chik'n Chunx, tofurkey.
The next category of hippie-food makes me smile. I suspect I fall in here somewhere. It's not about vegetarianism. It's about health. That's what we say. My older brother, BrotherLove, says it's food of the Bourgeoisie, but since knowing that word would make him a part of it, he says, "Bouj" (pronouncing just the first syllable of the word.).
So, with Bouj food, I and my compatriots eat meat that has been raised on mostly organic food. Our hamburgers were fed grass, not grain. Our chickens were free-range. Our bacon has no nitrates. We eat fresh eggs, preferably eggs that are local and really preferably the ones with brown shells, since anyone can get the white kind. Our milk should be hormone free (ours isn't). We should only use paper bags (we use plastic, too). Our clothes should be made of natural fibers (who has time to iron?). And preservatives are bad bad bad.
So you can see where some of these ideas begin to fall apart after a while. The effort of going to the hippie grocery store, not to mention the cost, has us running secretly to the big, well lighted, super-fresh smelling food store that sells things like candy bars, real chocolate, non-carob candy bars.
Now what the hell is my point? Here it is:
Natural food is messy.
We buy bread that has no preservatives. And then it grows mold before we can eat it. Now how earth-friendly is it of me to waste all that bread?
I bought doggie treats, Mr.Pugsly treats, at the hippie grocery store downtown. Normally I don't buy hippie dog treats because the dogs don't care and, no matter what anyone says, dogs neither feel better about themselves when they are nor care to be a vegetarian.
So I bought these things on the way to visit my parents at the lake. Sprocket was looking like she was going to barf, and giving her treats helps to settle her stomach. (She didn't like these kind, though. What a silly dog with good taste.)
So Spring won't eat them. Sprocket had grown to like them. You can imagine that we didn't go through them very quickly. Just today I got out some of the treats to fill up a Kong so Sprocket would stop googling her eyes at me and just chew on something. As I was shoving the treats into the Kong, though, the damnable treats began crumbling in my hands! And! There were little squirmy bug things in there! Ewwwwwwww.
So gross gross gross. This has never happened with any other box of dog treats. We've had dog treats for longer than this, and it's never happened.
I attribute it to the preservatives. No preservative dog treats=unpredictable organisms in my dog's food. No preservative bread=before I can eat my bread, I've got a mold farm.
I am advocating preservatives. Yes, that's right. I'm not going so far as to say that Twinkies or any other kind of preservative filled snacks are the way of the future, but do consider that preservatives may have been invented for a reason.
So champion the use of sodium benzoate!
Cheer for potassium sorbate!
Sing a little song for preservatives that make the big, wide world go round.
(Hey, think about irradiating your fruits at low doses, too. It could be a good thing. Not so many fruit flies.)