Entry #9 - Is Our Food Really Food Anymore?

Can't help but wonder...

So, it's fairly well-established at this point that I love using memes in my blog posts.  Many times they help offer a visual representation of a point I'm working on making.  ...that or they're just hilarious.  Sometimes they manage to be both and I might like those the most.  I've been posting a handful of entries regarding food and, as such, I've been searching for a lot of food-related memes.  I've found a lot of really good ones too but some have been significantly more thought provoking than others.  The following one in particular stuck out to me:

Now isn't that some "food for thought"?  When you really stop to think about it, the accuracy of this simple statement is glaringly obvious.  While superficially it's a very direct statement, what the image is speaking towards is a much deeper issue.  Addressing the viewers directly makes it personal and when it comes to the food we consume the topic is indeed an intensely personal one.  When we think about it, the questions start coming, sprouting up like newly growing vegetables in the garden of our minds.  How can my food harm me?  Why could it harm me?  What foods can help me be healthier?  How do I find out what foods are safer to eat, are better/healthier to eat?  Is my food really slowly poisoning me?

I grouped these two together because they both reference the same topic point: "food" as we call it today is no longer the healthy, nutrient rich fuel for our bodies that our grandparents once enjoyed.  Today, "food" has become the title given to over-processed, nutrient-deficient items which take the shape of foods familiar to us.  Somehow, our grandparents (and their grandparents and their grandparents) managed to survive without all this processing.  They didn't find the need to inject their vegetables with nutrients because they didn't process them to the point their foods lost all the natural nutrients they possessed.  They raised their cattle in grazing hills and slaughtered them humanely, taking only what they needed.  They didn't have to force feed the animals antibiotics to prevent infections because of the deplorable conditions they were kept in, or slaughtered in.  The standards for food were taken seriously and were upheld.  And then "mass-production" started coming into the picture.  Suddenly it wasn't cost-effective to do things the right way, the humane way, the safe way, it was about speed and producing as much as possible as fast as possible. 

Processed foods are cheap because by the time they make it to the grocery store they're barely what someone could consider food anymore.  When you systematically strip all that makes a food healthy, coat it in pesticides or stuff it full of antibiotics because of the deplorable conditions it's taken from, is it really food anymore?  How much of what we eat is really just food-shaped chemical and lab-created nutrient additives?  Why do we have to pay more for foods that aren't going through this mass production?  It would seem like the less work that's done the less expensive something would end up, not the opposite. 

A conversation I rather literally just had with my husband, while in the midst of writing this post, had to do with issues I saw in how people are treated in healthcare.  Being a nurse affords me a unique viewpoint on this topic.  Specifically he'd asked me about taking melatonin (a naturally occurring hormone in the body that helps in falling asleep and staying asleep) as an everyday pill to help stay asleep if someone is having issues.  My position is that no, they should take take the supplement everyday.  My reasoning for it is simple but complex at the same time - if a person's body isn't producing enough of a hormone, taking a pill to off-set what's lacking helps, yes.  And then the body realizes that there's a new source of this hormone and begins producing even less, resulting in a person having to take more pills to continually off-set the gradual, continued decrease of the hormone within the body. 

See where this is going?  We end up becoming so dependent on pills to "fix" what's wrong with us, we don't look at the fact that all we're doing is fixing the symptom and not the cause.  Most visits with a doctor are 10-15 minutes, if you're lucky, and consist more of "Ok what's going on?  Alright you're having XYZ symptoms, here's a prescription to deal with them."  While that's helpful for the immediate moment, it doesn't deal with the root of the problem.  Health care isn't health care - it's symptom management.  If we were truly caring for people's health there would be more conversations on how to help a person be healthy, not just throw pills at them to deal with symptoms. 

While my previous comments may seem like a bit of a departure from the topic, it goes hand in hand with the topic really.  Our diets, the food we put in our bodies, directly impacts our health.  Good food, healthy food, real food that isn't filled with additives, sprayed with pesticides, injected full of antibiotics and HGH and God knows what else is what will make an impact on our health.  While medication has it's place and it's importance, it shouldn't be the ultimate answer to everything that ails us.  If we made a true and concerted effort to improve the quality of the foods we eat we would find ourselves improving our overall health. 

So here's my question to you, anyone who happens to read this blog and this post, is the food you're eating capable of working as a medicine for your overall health and well-being?  Or are you steadily ingesting poison in the guise of food?  If you are what you eat what would you be, an organic being or an artificially nutrient-added, mass-produced, antibiotic-glutted, processed being?  The choice is yours.