This! This is what is wrong!

I am just so hung up. There's a traffic jam of obscenities and righteous indignations clogging up the tirade that is trying to pour forth.

This is what's wrong in America today, folks. This is why over 30% of us are obese. Not just fat, obese.

Ok... it's not the one and only factor... estrogen-mimicking plastics in our water and food and register receipts are part of it. But for fuck's sake... "less than once a week?" And they're not meaning Julia Child-style cooking, they likely include warming a disposable plastic bowl of Easy Mac or pouring a bowl of pencil-shavings cereal as "preparing food."

Ugh.

I have to go make lunch. It may involve simply warming things, but only because I already cooked them for real the first time.

Putting kids in a box

Today's rant isn't about food. Sorry. I flipped casually through the coupons this morning and didn't manage to get mad about anything. Perhaps I was distracted. Perhaps the coupons were more boring than normal. I do have a couple of weeks of backlogged rantiness hanging around here, cluttering up the table, but I honestly might never get to it.

Today's rant is about Toys R Us, and their rampant sexism. I had to go shopping today... my first non-doctor-related outing since the baby was born. My older son's birthday is coming up, and I didn't feel like clicking around Amazon. I wanted to see things in person. So there I was, with my list of ideas I'd come up with, plus ideas he'd come up with. And I noticed for the first time that they (the store) had made official something I'd jokingly referred to for years... the "pink aisle" was now truly pink. I had reserved that term for the Barbie aisles, usually, but it could be used to describe any of the very typically-girly zones of the toy department. I have a daughter, but she was rarely interested in the items in the pink aisle. I suppose she played outside the box. When she was three her favorite take-wherever-we're-going items were plastic snakes, Buzz Lightyear, and fuzzy stuffed snakes. No dolls. She eventually went nuts for Polly Pocket and then My Little Ponies, but that was the extent of it.

I said I was shopping today for my son, though. So why was I in a pink aisle? Why did I notice that the end caps of the aisles literally spell it out in painful sexist detail now? ("boys" and "girls" as if the blue and pink weren't enough.)

Because my son wanted a toy coffeemaker for his restaurant. Last year I bought him the un-pinkest play kitchen I could find, because he loves to cook. He prefers real cooking, and would almost certainly prefer a real coffeemaker, but sometimes a mom has to insist on harder-to-break plastic. So I had to shop a pink aisle for him, and hope he doesn't mind a glittery purple coffeemaker. He probably won't. He luckily has no idea whatsoever that he's supposed to like certain things and not others. He has all the "right" boy toys- sturdy metal Tonka truck, balls, Indiana Jones play set, Star Wars blasters, football helmet, and Duplos. But he also has a little shopping bag, play food, his own apron (another thing that was hard to find in not-pink), and this Christmas he asked for and got a Littlest Pet Shop adoption center. It's pink. With frilly bits and flowers. He loves it, no matter what Toys R Us thinks.

How dare they compartmentalize our children? There's already enough societal bias and strong messages about what's "right" to play with, without them being so damn blatant about it. Ads with girls playing with dolls and boys playing with trucks make it very clear what Everyone thinks about things. We don't need to smack our kids in the face with it. My son can read already, and if I took him to Toys R Us, I'm not sure what he'd think about those labels. On the one hand, he's a strongly-opinionated boy, secure in his rightness... so he may just think they're wrong and move on. On the other hand, he very much likes to learn how the world works, what the rules are... so I can easily see him boxing away his own interests just to match what some stupid corporation thinks he should or shouldn't enjoy.

I find it very ironic that cooking is a pink aisle thing, anyway, considering the rampant sexism that still exists in the male-dominated world of professional chefs. Gah!

I'm not sure what to DO about this. If I were a more organized woman, I might try to organize a boycott or some such thing. But I honestly have no idea how long they've had those infuriating labels up. Possibly years. I don't go to Toys R Us much.

I just know that they really pissed me off. How dare they tell my children what to play with? How to correctly have fun? My kids get to be whoever the hell they want to be.

Oh, my daughter was with me today, and nicely asked for a little play set with a horse, some accessories, and a little girl. I was surprised with her choice and tried to talk her out of it... she never picks toys with people in them. She agreed that she usually doesn't, and said her room currently has a "shortage of humans." I laughed at the funny way she'd said it... and then really laughed when my darling daughter further explained why she wanted the little girl in the play set. Food. For the wild creatures the inhabit my daughter's playtime. A feeder human!! So, my girl has finally found a use for little dolls... ha ha ha!

No coupons?

I get all ready to make my bloggy comeback, and there are no coupons? What is wrong with this world? C'mon... kill ten thousand trees to print up toxicly-inked incitements that convince me I am an inferior mother because I don't gas my kids with Lysol when they come in from playing in dirt. (Dirt... ew... it's so... dirty.) Is this a Christmas reprieve for my ego? Will they recommence the assault on my sanity on the 27th? Or wait until the new year? Let us not forget that we will need to be bombarded with reminders that it's time to make our New Year's Resolutions. If we somehow weren't reminded, we might not only forget that it was a new year, but also forget that it's time for our annual self-loathing to begin and self-punishment to ensue. So, I certainly hope they don't leave us hanging for long. If the coupons don't return on the 27th, we'll be 3 whole days into the new year before we have our bright, colorful, low-fat instructions.

I do think they need to figure out just exactly what they want us to do. They seem to give mixed messages. On the one hand, we've all learned from commercials and coupons and print ads that fresh baked cookies = love. If I don't have a plateful of sugar for my children on a regular basis, they will grow up believing their mother didn't love them. They make it perfectly clear. And holidays will be remembered with tears in therapy if I don't include lots of rolls from a tubular can. But then they also want us to all lose weight. You can't have it both ways! I can either love my family or have them be thin. And I absolutely cannot love them at all unless I've been pampering myself properly. That requires layers of body products that mostly smell like all the food I'm not allowed to eat. Vanilla volumizing shampoo, chocolate mint intensive conditioner, berries-and-cream anti-wrinkle moisturizer, probably some sort of grape-extract eye-lifter or whatever other goop a dutifully-young-looking mother ought to use.

But if I did all that, there's always the risk that my poor starved children would eat me.

I'd better start baking some cookies.

Salty talk

I'm so glad that New York is the center of the universe and that its mayor has become the benevolent dictator of us all.

Having solved all the other problems, from homelessness to cancer, Mayor Bloomberg is now waging a war on salt.

WTF?!

Yes, my knickers are in a twist over this one. I realize that high levels of sodium can sometimes raise blood pressure in susceptible individuals. But it is NOT the demon it has been made out to be. (Imagine that, me disagreeing with a commonly-held belief about nutrition!) Real salt, whole salt, with all the myriad trace minerals in it, is a wonderfully healthy addition to the diet. But I doubt Mayor "God" Bloomberg knows that. I doubt his edict takes that into account.

To take it even further, salt can be much more than just a health-neutral flavor-enhancer. It is an important medicine for me. That's right, I said medicine (great, now the FDA will be breaking down my door to confiscate my salt shaker.) A year ago I was diagnosed with adrenal fatigue. Too much stress, too much coffee and sugar, too many allergies... yeah, I was really sick. This post isn't about adrenal issues, so I won't go into detail on that, but there is a lot of information that suggests that salt is vitally important for the adrenal glands. Yes, it's a much-needed nutrient. Common advice for people with adrenal glad problems is to start their morning with 1/2 to 1 teaspoon of good, natural, mineral-rich sea salt in a glass of water. I didn't want to taste that, so instead I put a little bit in every glass of water I drink throughout the day. The results were astounding. I instantly had more energy, more clarity of thought, and better moods. From salt. I realize this is simply anecdotal, not science... a sample size of one doesn't prove anything. But there are many more "ones" out there if you google around.

And since when has it been the government's job to protect us from salt? Protect us from brazenly unsafe food... rotten meat being chemically treated and put into sausage... milk being watered down and fortified with nasty additives... produce being sprayed with toxic chemicals to keep it "fresh" (oh, wait, the government is in favor of that one... hmmm...) but that is the limit. I am a grown woman. I decide what goes in my mouth. I do not want a babysitter and I will not tolerate someone forcing their inaccurate opinions about health down my throat!

Bloomberg also took on public smoking and trans fats... and I have mixed feelings about that. Both are unhealthy... true. But who's job is it to decide?

And the part that really scares me is at the end of the article... maybe I'm reading too much into it, but maybe I'm not.

"Thomas Frieden, the city's health commissioner, said he wants manufacturers and restaurants to join the war on salt voluntarily. If they don't, the city could pass legislation making it the law."

Let me get this straight... if I'm a restaurant my choices are to voluntarily reduce the salt in my menu offerings or... be forced to reduce the salt in my menu offerings. Hmmm... that's not really a choice. Why even use the word "voluntarily?" What a threat! "Do what we want or we'll make you do what we want." Has the government of New York City always used knee-capping tactics and I just haven't noticed?

I wonder what's next on Emperor Bloomberg's list of personal causes? It had better not be butter, or else he really will find himself at war.

Fat-Free Vegan?

Bonus rant! (Warning, very offensive to people who like to get offended.)

So, I was innocently surfing through my Morning Coffee tabs this morning, when one of my favored food blogs showed a link to Fat-Free Vegan, a blog. And I snapped. I didn't even click on it, but I snapped. I'm sorry... I know how much vegetarians and vegans hate it when carnivores care what they do or don't eat. Normally I don't care. Normally I just eat what I eat and everyone else can do the same and I rant in my personal space and that's it.

But... I snapped.

Fat-free vegan? WTF? What do they eat? They don't eat nuts, obviously, because those have fat. They don't eat yummy avocados, because those have fat. They must eat carrot sticks and celery and... lettuce. Bunny food. They are at the bottom of the food chain. They are negating millions of years of evolution- so much hard work by countless generations of ancestors. All for what? Some uppity feeling of purity? What did they do that was so wrong, in this life or the last, that requires such a cruel penitence? Who were they? Are today's vegans all recycled S.S. soldiers? Were they gassing Jews for Hitler and have to cleanse their souls in this life?

I just don't understand.

So, naturally, I'm making bacon right now. A great big pan full of drippy bacon, happily roasting away in my fat-spattered oven, juices popping, formerly-alive cells bursting and caramelizing with tantalizing animal flavor.

Take that and stick it in your carrot-hole.

Anyway, back to evolutionary freakatude. (OMG, did you know freakatude is actually a word? I didn't.) 4 million years ago great-great-Grandpa Ape dropped down from his tree and wandered around a bit, looking for something to eat. He found the ocean. He caught a fish. He ate it, the delicious, healthy, nourishing fats went straight to his brain and it instantly got half a size bigger. He got a great idea to make a net and catch more fish. His family gorged themselves on delicious ocean animals and got so smart they became the kings and queens of apes. The cranky vegan apes climbed back up and lived in sterile little religious nut colonies, not having any babies, and soon died out.

How is it they've come back?

Fat-free vegan. What in the name of all that is yummy would provoke a person to do that to themselves? Do they think it will keep them healthy and strong? Because it won't. It will not. Unless they have some sort of freakish metabolic disorder whereby they cannot process fats... but even then, the body REQUIRES fat. It is not optional. The body will start stripping itself down for scrap, if it has to. That poor freak's brain will likely be the first to go- which is ok, since they aren't using it.

I just flipped my bacon. It's coming along quite nicely. Mmmmm... bacon...

I just really don't understand fat-phobe people. Seriously. They seem to all have a connection with religious-based self-mortification. The idea that we are inherently sinful and disgusting, and must be saved from ourselves. This seems to lead people to believe that any and all natural impulses can't be trusted. Humans LOVE fat. We crave creamy, buttery, juicy foods. So, these people rationalize those foods must be bad. Unhealthy. Sinful. And since when did unhealthy = sinful, anyway? So many people feel actual sin-type remorse if they eat the "wrong" thing or don't exercise that day. I just don't understand. Guilt serves no purpose.

God made bacon. How can people reject the gift?

Fat-free vegan. Not low-fat vegan... no, that's sooooo yesterday. Every self-loathing, unhappy emo kid does that. Fat-free. That's just... impossible. Even vegetables have waxy coatings to their cells. Every freaking living thing on the planet has some sort of fat in it. There's a reason for that. It's necessary for life. Especially in humans.

BTW... I can explain those feelings of self-loathing and depression... they stem from a lack of fat. Seriously. I became clinically depressed for several months following a bout of giardiasis (food poisoning, basically) that left me unable to digest much fat. It took me a year to recover. That's how important fat is.

I'm going to go eat my bacon now.