Wednesday, May 11, 2011

1490 Simple Eating

The other day I was at the store looking for things to eat for dinner. As I often have dinner for one, I'm on a constant quest for simplicity. You want to think that simple is better. Less muss, less fuss, less things in it to poison you.
So I thought, I'll just grab a simple pepperoni pizza. Crust, tomato sauce, pepperoni and cheese. How bad can it be?
Apparently, pretty bad. As I waited for it to cook, I looked at the ingredients on the box. There were 59 of them listed.
59 ingredients to make a "simple" frozen pizza. Why? Here's the rub. We once died of food poisoning brought on by spoilage. So we started refrigerating and freezing our food. But when we started freezing our food we started having our food get freezer damage. As any cryogenic freeze-people-to-be-revived-later expert will tell you, tissue that goes in the freezer is not the same tissue when it comes out of the freezer.
The answer to freezer damage? More chemical additives. Which eventually kill us too. Salts, nitrites, nitrates, BHT, ammonium sulfate, L-cysteine hydrochloride, BHA...yum.
I did like the listing for the pepperoni though. Red Baron pepperoni is the all-animal anti-vegetarian killer. Their pepperoni is made from beef, pork, and chicken.
The non-infected trifecta, because it’s chemicalized, of course.
The pepperoni itself has 16 ingredients, and for some reason, they felt it was important to note that it was "mechanically separated" chicken. Perhaps to assure us that there weren't any human skin flakes mixed it too.
Or other chunks, sausage-making in the urban jungle has a less than stellar reputation in that regard.
And god forbid prepared food should have any other human touch at any step in the industrial process.
Let's keep poisoning ourselves simple...
America, ya gotta love it.

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