Archive for December, 2011

So while you are listening to this week’s show about the candification of American food, I am in Utah at a hiking bootcamp spa-ish kind of place, getting some much-needed outdoor time and a lot of exercise. I already get a lot of exercise at home, but this place kind of forces you to really push your limits, and I want to be pushed to my limits.

The food at the spa (it’s not really a spa) is tolerable, but still, Foodiness slips its sticky fingers into everything these days….Especially when it comes to sweetness. We are here because we are interested in health and well-being, right? So why are they using stuff like Splenda and Stevia in our food? Can’t we just eliminate the sweetness factor in the menu for a week? I snuck a look at the recipe binder for the cook, and I’d say 50% of the recipes called for Foodiness additions. From sugar-free marmalade, and diet soda in baked goods, to cooking spray and margarine!!

I know its all well-intentioned, and people do come here to lose weight, but I cant get away from the Foodiness! I don’t need everything I eat to be sweet, but it seems as if we have become a nation of sweetness addicted overgrown children. Do I need to eat Splenda-sweetened fake ice cream after dinner? No, I’m pretty sure I don’t. How ’bout an apple?

The legendary Food Warrior Marion Nestle joins me tonight on Let’s Get Real to talk Food v. Foodiness. She’s one of the people who inspired me to start thinking about this stuff in the first place, so I’m eager to get her thoughts on how to bring REAL FOOD to the Foodiness masses….

When the apocalypse comes, and the grid crashes down, who’s going to feed you?

Not our friends in the Foodiness industry, they need a grid, and a factory to make their fabricated food fodder. So you, my friend, will be on your own. So if you’ve been eating canned soup all your life, or buying frozen breakfast burritos, or pre-grilled chicken patties, or whipped topping in a tub, I have news for you. You’d better get your sh*t together and learn how to cook a few basic staples, or you’re gonna starve.

Think back to how your grandma made soup, all simmering and bubbly in her giant cast-iron crock on her big wood-burning cook-stove up there on Walton’s mountain….oh, wait, that wasn’t you… You grew up in Massapequa in the 70’s, right? Your grandma was playing cards in Boca and wearing Dacron, and eating canned peaches and cottage cheese, not making soup from a deer’s head…sorry, I forgot.

Your grandma most likely embraced the convenience of post-war era Foodiness, after decades of saving up her bacon grease in a jar, and your Mom loved Foodiness because it freed her up to smoke her Virginia Slims and get divorced, and we slurped our canned soup and watched hours of TV while we fell deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole of Foodiness completely. We’ve all been eating canned soup and pre-made convenience food for so long that we can’t even recognize real food anymore, let alone cook it for ourselves.

That’s what I call the Foodiness Firewall. Pre-prepared “foods” – like tomato and chicken soup — keeps us so far from tomatoes and chicken — that we don’t know what it is when we see it. …much less what to do with it.

Which brings me to the apocalypse. Not to sound like your great grandma, but it’s coming. So get ready. Probably on the first Tuesday of next November. Better learn how to make some soup, or an egg. It’s not that hard, some of it’s pretty easy, and a hell of a lot cheaper and way better for you than the manufactured dopplegangers of foodiness.

Save the canned soup for your fallout-shelter, and pray really hard that you’ll never have to eat it. It’s sh*t, and why would you want to eat that?