In tonight’s episode – Ignorance Is Bliss…Until You Get Diabetes – I get real about the fact that getting real about food is not blissful; how living in a world where you just choose between the red and purple zero-calorie sports drink; the veggie puffs and the protein bar; or the salmon and the tuna feels blissful… until you get cancer, mercury poisoning, heart disease and/or diabetes; how opening up the menu and having to choose between the industrially raised corn-fed steak full of hormones and the industrially raised corn-fed chicken full of hormones can cause food-paralysis and First World eating disorders like Orthorexia (or fear of eating non-healthy foods), when the reality is that people in sub-Saharan Africa aren’t tortured over the fact that the grain of rice that just came off the U.N. plane has a big carbon footprint and is covered in pesticide residue; and how to accept the cold-hard realities of no longer being ignorant, which is to realize that at least you’re thin and can feel superior to people who don’t know any better.

In tonight’s episode – Vitamins Come From Food, Not Gummies – I get real about foodiness “vitamins”; how the real reason we think we need to take foodiness vitamins is because we don’t eat real food with real vitamins; the fact that nobody actually knows what vitamins taken out of food and put into supplements actually do or don’t do; how taking vitamins out of context and putting them in another context is like when Madonna acts; how putting vitamins into things like Gummy Bears is just giving people an excuse to sit around and eat candy; how certain vitamins can be toxic in large doses, which taking in candy form puts people at risk for; how if you’re going to overdose (or worse, choke) at least go out in a blaze of glory like Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix – not sitting on the couch popping Gummy Vitamins in front of Bridezillas; and how to realistically get all the vitamins you need – which is to just eat real food.

In tonight’s episode – You Are What Your Fish Ate – I get real about what foodiness has done to fish; about how we’re all constantly told by too blond, too skinny, too happy, tan-in-January nutritionists on morning talk shows to eat oily fish like salmon or tuna in order to get our Omega 3’s, while conveniently ignoring that farmed salmon is low in Omega-3’s (and high in Omega-6’s, which can cause heart disease) and tuna is toxic with mercury (and on the verge of extinction); how non-foodies are vaguely aware something is up with fish, but they think, “I’m not eating McDonalds, so how bad could it be?”; and how to realistically get real about fish: only eat “wild” salmon; try smaller, lower profile fish like sardines and herring; and don’t eat tuna at all – it’s completely f*ed up.

Tonight, on “Let’s Get Real”….It was the perfect storm. The late Victorian era and its obsession with purity of body and soul, (meaning pooping) the exploding of the industrial revolution, and the dawn of “marketing” from America’s food manufacturers. Guess what they all combined to invent? Foodiness Breakfast Mania! This is where it all began, folks, with a rolled out oat flake and a fear of the body and all its messy needs and discharges. So in came Foodiness, to fill the void (so to speak)….and now we have Cereal and “Milk” bars with no actual milk products in them…OMG! Better off eating leftover pizza than an organic poptart is my motto, I learned that from my niece, who commands no definition of what makes a food meal-specific, and will happily eat pad thai or caesar salad for her morning meal.

Tonight, on “Let’s Get Real”….As Gilda Radner said, (as Rhonda Weiss of Rhonda and the Rhondettes)…”Research proves that men prefer thin girls with cancer, than healthy girls with chunky thighs” Hmmm, sounds like a fair deal to me, having been born to a tribe of chubster peasant-types, shaped like Bosc pears. And most cancer is curable now anyway, isn’t it??
I TRIED to live on diet soda, back in the 80′s, but it made me so darn sick, I had to switch to water and real food. So inconvenient…. So, if those are your choices, pack up your cooler and strap on your fanny pack. You’ll need to go far, far down the Foodiness rabbit hole, past the bottom, to a brand new place. A place I’ve never even mentioned before. Its beyond the River Sprite…, past the point of no 5-cent return, The 7-up’th circle of hell, where you’ll find Donald Rumsfeld waiting for you, with a tall, cold glass of poison in hand, sweetened with Splenda with Vitamins, and eternal thinness will finally be yours…Or, you can move to Utah. Listen to the episode to find out why…

Tonight, on “Let’s Get Real”…The staff of life, the breadwinner, our daily bread, my comPANion…bread is deep within us, it’s what made us, and our culture, way back when. Before my ancestors – and I don’t mean Jackie Mason and Dinah Shore – were fleeing from Egypt with those tasteless crackers and no butter for them, bread was being baked, by hand, from 2 ingredients: water and flour. And then, along came…Foodiness! And now, we have sandwich thins and ingredient lists with stuff that sounds like they belong in hair gel. Actually, hair gel might be better for you…Our bread has been candified, squishified, whitened and brightened, and made to taste like cake. If I want cake, I’ll eat cake. Let them eat bread, but only if it’s real bread, which doesn’t have anything in it that sounds like it belongs in a pharmaceutical. Otherwise, better off eating hair products.

In tonight’s episode – You’re Being Infantilized By Fiber Bars – I get real about foodiness infantilization; how pre-preparing everything we eat and feeding us cookies, candy and Kool-Aid packaged as healthy food enhanced with nutrition is turning us into permanently dependent children; why foodiness manufacturing wants to infantilize us – because it makes us completely dependent on foodiness and unable to see that fiber comes from vegetables, not chocolate chip flavored fiber bars; how using foodiness to turn us into children who believe anything we’re told turns us into gullable children in every other aspect of our lives (see adults fixated on how many “friends” they have; grownups dazzled by toys they can’t put down; the Real Housewives); and how to realistically grow the fu*k up across the board, which is just to eat real food.

Do you work out? Lift weights? Pump iron? Why? For strength and health, or something else?…Do you want to be big, pumped, massive? Sure, lots of us want to be that. Or fit, toned, lean, muscled, whatever. And whatever our fitness goals, Foodiness has an app for that.  Did Hercules need to drink X-treme-max-power-metrix-carbo-whey-formula? Or did he need to just lift a lot of heavy stuff and eat real food? Do you? All those sports and fitness Foodiness products do for you is take you so far down the rabbit hole that there’s nothing left to eat on the other side! Wanna get ripped? Or just ripped off? Plus, a story of a tiny bodybuilder who kept his appendix, but lost his stones…

Sometimes I just can’t even believe that  a mere 150 or so years ago, to get across this massive country of ours, you’d have to hitch up your horses, pack up 3 months worth of non-perishable food, load up your rifle, pack up the family, and set off in a wagon. Made of wood. With no real roads and nary a town west of the Mississippi ’til you hit LA, (if you made it all the way), you were seriously on your own. With no rest-stops, no Panera and Quik-Check, and Iron Skillet guiding you westward, I find it hard to believe that people even made it. How did we manage to settle across such a gigantically freaking huge land mass in just 200-odd years? Using horses, and wagons? 

I know people made it ok, like the Ingalls, my favorite family, and thrived and all, but not everyone was so lucky, or smart, or maybe just good at finding food. I’d like to think I would have made it, I’m pretty resourceful, and semi-tough, and despite my weekly rantings, not too picky about food. Not that pickiness would play any part in trans-continental survival. Eat or be eaten would be my motto. (still kind of is)

So why is it so hard for me now, in our world of endless-food-at-our-fingertips, to ever find something to eat when I’m on the road? The modern, paved, petroleum-fueled road lined with food options. Maybe because in that 150-odd years, we’ve turned our food into Foodiness, and I was really meant to travel by covered wagon, not by Subaru Forester or Southwest?

In tonight’s episode — Big Foodiness Gets Occupied — I get real about how to snatch food back from the jaws of corporate foodiness with Occupy Big Food co-founder Kristin Wartman; why the McDonalds and Applebee’s crowd or the garden burger and protein bar crowd should care about how their chicken fingers or their Tofu Chik’n Fingers are produced; Wartman’s theory that the Sarah Palin chocolate chip cookie defenders identify with their corporate food kidnappers a la the Stockholm Syndrome; and whether the Occupy Big Food message can realistically get out to the mainstream in time to save food for the future or if real food is going to be permanently replaced by foodiness like Facebook has replaced friends and reality shows have replaced talent.