FLOG: The Foodiness Blog

tonight’s episode of Let’s Get Real, I Was a Child Cheez Doodle Addict, I pack up my Walkman and my copy of Let’s Go; Europe 1986, and my little address book and my down sleeping bag all into my giant frame backpack and head off to the old country. Didn’t everybody do this? Schlep around Europe for a month or two during a college summer? And what did you eat the most? What cheap staple food combination did you shove into your pack for that overnight train to Florence? Bread and cheese, of course! The two staples of European life. You could live on that sh*t forever if you had to…

But back home, in the dorm, where you had a toaster or a hot plate? Then it was grilled cheese city all the way. Also an excellent staple food for the impoverished student. As long as you used REAL cheese and not Foodiness™ cheeze…but if you did, I don’t even want to know, ok? Lalalalala…I’m not listening to you…Well, at least you were “cooking”.

So then how did we get to this point? What point is that, you ask? The point where we have grilled-cheese-flavored puffy corn snax and mac-n-cheese flavor too… How? How did this happen? Yes, cheez doodles have existed since the Eisenhower years, along with puffy corn snax in all forms, but now we’re flavoring them like cooked food preparations. Not just cheez flavored, but grilled-cheese flavored…I mean, I could see red velvet flavor, or birthday flavor, but grilled cheese? Jeez.

On this episode of Let’s Get Real, “If You Have Time to Listen to This, You Have Time to Make Popcorn“… I go way back in time to visit my pretend BFF, Laura Ingalls at her Little House on the you-know-where…Seems that back then in Laura’s day, folks didn’t spend their days sitting on their tushies grazing on Foodiness™ snack foods and sucking on sippy cups of sugary water. They had actual, real work to do. And no internet. Yet oddly, no snack food products were to be found for at least another 50 years…Funny, because they were burning up gazillions more calories than us, and you’d think they would have needed to be cramming fistfuls of cheezy poofies and veggie doodly-doos into their mouths full of crooked, yellow teeth all day long for sustenance. But according to my thorough research (watching TV) the only real snack food they had was popcorn, and they had to MAKE it themselves! There were no whale oil-powered microwaves, yet.

Popcorn’s been eaten in the Americas since ancient times, and almost every day since then at my house. So come with me down the rabbit hole, past the museum of outdated, obsolete, popcorn making technology, and into my popcorn lab, as we go deep into the Foodiness-filled realm of the new world’s oldest snack. Don’t forget your dental floss…

You are not who you think you are. You are not yourself. You are merely a vessel for a bazillion, gadrillion bacteria who live in your gut, and who control your every move, action and thought. Those tiny guys call the shots, not you. About your health, your weight, your emotional well-being, your longevity, your voting choices, your internet provider. Everything. Really. And the more we learn about them, the more clearly we see that. But, if you are like literally everyone else ever, since the invention of Penicillin—the first antibiotic, your gut may not be itself either. Because rounds and rounds of antibiotics over a lifetime wipe out those tiny dictators, and once they’re dead, it’s hard to get them back up to their fighting numbers.

And losing those little critters can mean a lifetime of illness, especially autoimmune disorders, and even worse, obesity. Because when you wipe out the gut flora, the body reacts by gaining weight, and this may well be a contributing factor to the epidemic of obesity around the world. Well, that and all the Foodiness™, and all the soda, and the triple meat stuffed-crust pizza and the pillow-sized bags of cheezy puffs and the peanut butter-cup flavored cereal and the rainbow-flavored “go-gurt”. That stuff doesn’t help much, either.

The lunatic fringe (me) has been screaming about this stuff for years, and now the very un-fringe-like New York Times has taken up the call. Hard to believe, but it’s finally on, and the fringe is winning. An article in Sunday’s Times confirms it, along with another very odd and very BIG coincidence in my life that also confirms that my life is full of odd coincidences…and it’s all in tonight’s show. So tonight, on “Let’s Get Real, the cooking show about finding, preparing and eating FOOD”, we take a look at the situation. From celebrity sighting in the mountains of New Hampshire, to my newly Paleo-eating niece, to scab covered crazy ladies in Portland, it’s all here, and it’s all live tonight at 6:30 on www.heritageradionetwork.org, or later on www.letsgetrealshow.com