Food

Food is so important...before I became a mother, I didn't much think about food.  I mean, I did insofar as I am definitely a foodie - I thought about eating food all day long. In fact, one of the reasons why I cannot stand to (nor do I) sleep in is because if you do, you miss breakfast!  Well, breakfast is delicious!

Once I became a mother...
food became a whole other ballgame.  A beast, really.  I think because I've dug deep and I have friends that are just as obsessed about nutrition and healthy, real food as I am that you start to wonder "Does eating out really worth it?"  The industrialized meat farming that is practiced here is just out of control.  Eating meat at restaurants really is not healthy.  In fact, eating at most restaurants is not healthy at all - from the meat, to the vegetables that are probably bought in bulk, pre-washed (which means bleach and who knows what else) and everything is cooked in vegetable oil which is most likely GMO, bad for you.  Sigh.

Already, I will not order chicken at restaurants.  I think the way they treat chickens is absolutely disgusting.  My husband doesn't listen though. He likes to eat fried chicken, chicken wings...I'd rather figure out how we can fry it ourselves and buy our chicken straight from the farm.  That's how we get our eggs. We will never buy supermarket eggs.

There is one thing that I just have not been able to give up - pork.  I'm Chinese.  We put pork in everything. If I stopped eating pork then I might as well stop eating at Chinese restaurants.  Oh wait, but I should not be eating at restaurants, right?

See what I mean?  It's so hard to exist these days without overextending myself to make my own food so that I can be sure that my family is getting wholesome, nutritious real food.

And today I come across this article that talks about the recent outbreak of salmonella from a Foster Farms Chicken plant.  Apparently, Foster Farms just went about business as usual.  WHAT??  How are we so desensitized that as a democracy, nobody is up in arms and demanding more for our food!!

But, even more disturbing is in the comment that follows the article.  Here is an excerpt:

Another part of the equation is education. I have daughters trying to learn 9th grade biology using a mainstream text book. When they encountered bacteria for the first time in this book it said bacteria were responsible for food borne illness and infections...that's it, no mention of the necessary and positive functions of bacteria. Then a few pages later it said GMO's were a good thing and the standardized test prep question asked how GMO's are helping our world. Really, I'm not making this up. We were appalled, disappointed and my girls seriously wonder why a text book would mislead and misinform with such regularity. Then a few weeks later my 1st year college student taking intro to biology tells us her professor gave a lecture on how good GMO's are...said 95% of US crops are GM so labeling is pointless, only a few small farms grow GMO free and no one buys it anyway. I just about lost it...I'm paying for this_____ education they call it???

Scary.  Just scary.  How can lies so infiltrate every aspect of our society?  Does no one care about his fellow man anymore? Something should be done about this.  Where to start?