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?

Bottled water that makes you thin, young, and smart; green tea drinks that taste like lemonade; diet soda with “natural” flavors. Foodiness drinks have almost entirely highjacked real hydration.

The latest foodiness drink ready to solve your problems? Neuro: The Operating System for Life. With a tagline that reads, “there’s a Neuro for that”, the product’s claims read like something from Alice in Wonderland: there’s one to make you energetic; one to make you sleepy; one to make you focused; one to make you awake; one to make you relaxed; and one to make you horny. Hear that Alice?

What’s actually in Neuro products? Water, sugar, coloring (or basically anything you’d find in soda) and a host of other ingredients derived from compounds and chemicals that may, or may not, in their natural state have some kind of effect or “benefit”, but claiming those benefits here is as big a stretch as tomato paste on a pizza qualifying as a vegetable.

Neuro takes us so far down the foodiness rabbit hole with its seductive promises of quick fixes for every “that” you’ve got you’d think there must be a Neuro for getting out.

In fact, getting out of the rabbit hole of foodiness drinks – or drinkiness – is probably the easiest among all the foodiness groups. Unlike consuming real eggs or real meat or real fruit, all which can be extremely inconvenient, getting real with beverages is easy: just drink tap water. You don’t have to schlep to the farmer’s water market or know how to decipher labels – all you have to do is mosey over the sink and pour a glass. Consider tap water your get-out-of-foodiness-free card.

Cocktails, however, are another matter…

Additional reporting by Belinda Rodriguez.