Late night dilemma
As I sit here, back at work in Los Angeles, ready to launch into overtime in order to start saving up for my next epic tuition payment next August, I contemplate food. It's past dinnertime and I'm hungry, of course, but I'm also thinking about my resolution this year to cut environmentally harmful factory meat and farm products out of my diet. By the time I leave the office in Downtown and get on the subway train to North Hollywood, it will easily be past 11pm. I have two conflicting desires: On one hand, I desire to eat fresh, healthy, non-packaged food as often as possible. On the other, I desire cheap food I can get at any time. I'm a busy girl, after all, and have a budget to balance.
The difficulty of obtaining healthy food that doesn't contain pig anuses, preservatives or pesticides infuriates me. Local growers close early and are only in select locations. Organic dairy products and eggs don't last as long as their hormone-injected counterparts and have to be purchased and used up more frequently--and the cost is higher as well. It's like the food industry targets poor neighborhoods and families on a budget and makes the worst food the most accessible, creating a whole new generation of chronically-diseased diabetics for the future.
I don't know. I just don't know. It seemed like while I was in China, eating healthily was so incredibly simple. Everything was a fish or a crab or a wild chicken caught that very morning, and you could see directly where the food was coming from, bones and skin and head and all. There's something to be praised there. There's such a serious disconnect between our food sources and what we stuff into our mouths in rich, developed countries like the United States. I was listening to a report on NPR the other night about gold and silver nanoparticles used for food in the UK, for flavoring and shelf life purposes. Nanoparticles that safety authorities are unable to regulate! This shit is crazy! What have we become?
Anyway, I'll have to try my best in the future to work my schedule around fresh food availability as often as I can, but for tonight it'll be a veggie burrito from the little taco truck down the street. It's not perfect, but it's the best I can do after 11pm, on a tight budget. At least it's easy to avoid factory meat when there's no meat in your meal at all!
For more information about produce commerce, have a listen to Act One of this episode of This American Life. It's a fun segment.
The difficulty of obtaining healthy food that doesn't contain pig anuses, preservatives or pesticides infuriates me. Local growers close early and are only in select locations. Organic dairy products and eggs don't last as long as their hormone-injected counterparts and have to be purchased and used up more frequently--and the cost is higher as well. It's like the food industry targets poor neighborhoods and families on a budget and makes the worst food the most accessible, creating a whole new generation of chronically-diseased diabetics for the future.
I don't know. I just don't know. It seemed like while I was in China, eating healthily was so incredibly simple. Everything was a fish or a crab or a wild chicken caught that very morning, and you could see directly where the food was coming from, bones and skin and head and all. There's something to be praised there. There's such a serious disconnect between our food sources and what we stuff into our mouths in rich, developed countries like the United States. I was listening to a report on NPR the other night about gold and silver nanoparticles used for food in the UK, for flavoring and shelf life purposes. Nanoparticles that safety authorities are unable to regulate! This shit is crazy! What have we become?
Anyway, I'll have to try my best in the future to work my schedule around fresh food availability as often as I can, but for tonight it'll be a veggie burrito from the little taco truck down the street. It's not perfect, but it's the best I can do after 11pm, on a tight budget. At least it's easy to avoid factory meat when there's no meat in your meal at all!
For more information about produce commerce, have a listen to Act One of this episode of This American Life. It's a fun segment.