I have always tried to eat well, but not always successfully. My mother got me started by feeding us brown bread (as it was known then) instead of white. I felt ripped off and underprivileged at school as we all took out our lunches and I noticed that my sandwich was the only one not beautifully enfolded in pure as driven snow, flawless white bread. Mom would never think of buying it and, like Nutella, this remained a forbidden food in our home. She also bought unsweetened peanut butter. We were not vegetarian but she did stuff us with salads and fresh fruit whether we would let her or not.
When I was eighteen I became vegetarian, to my mother's consternation but I was living on my own so I ate whatever I wanted. I cut way back on sugar and tried to base my diet on natural and organic food, not an easy feat in 1974, but not impossible. I lost a lot of weight and at five foot eight inches weighed in at a whopping one hundred thirty-five pounds. On my twentieth birthday, flying back from Toronto, my inflight dinner was roast beef. I ate it without complaining. I did not die and I wasn't sick. And it tasted rather good.
For years I still remained what was then called semi-vegetarian, buying fish but nothing else though I would not turn down meat and poultry in a restaurant or as a dinner guest. Then I began to buy and prepare at home meat and poultry. I backslid into a full-fledged carnivore for more than ten years until, at the age of thirty-seven, just after I became an artist, I mysteriously lost my craving for meat, then poultry and eventually fish. It was an easy organic process (forgive the pun). I also eventually gained sixty pounds, thirty of which I have lost in the past year and still losing more.
I have never lived in a time when so many people seem obsessed with food. The great foodie binge I find particularly revolting. I really cannot believe the preciosity involved in this silly trend, and more recently this obsession with bacon in everything and poutine (poutine flavoured soda anyone?) Everything has to be organically grown, fairly traded or locally sourced or it is not admissible as food. I do try wherever I can but I live on a tight budget so I am going to shop for what I can afford in stores that I can afford to shop in.
Does anyone remember the Atkins Diet? The Paleolithic Diet, it's evil twin? Eat all the meat you want and chuck out the potatoes? Ten years ago when the Atkins Diet had a lot of people brainwashed I had the audacity to buy a ten pound bag of potatoes (hey I got the kit and caboodle for two bucks so I wasn't going to turn down a bargain.) The bus driver began to lecture me on the danger of carbohydrates and the evil of potatoes. He had found the truth, he had seen the light, he was on the Atkins Diet and losing weight faster than you could say "Oink!" As I left the bus I nearly told him that he is a bus driver not a dietitian and he should please just stay behind the goddamn steering wheel and collect fares and otherwise mind his own bacon-fryin' business.
Now the great food villain is wheat, or was till recently. Wheat belly, Wheat brain, fields of golden death in every slice of bread. Oh me, oh my. Everyone it seemed was giving up bread and pasta or telling everyone else to and I simply tried not to tell them to go to hell while I continued stuffing my pie hole with lovely gluten and carbohydrates.
I'm still losing weight by the way.
I wonder how much Monsanto is to blame with Frankenfood and the way they are monopolizing agriculture with genetically modified everything and demanding with legal writ complete legal rights over seeds. The fact of the matter is I think everyone is just really terrified of the inevitable and this is nothing they have any control over, and if you don't have control over everything then what my dear is going to become of you? The short answer is everyone is afraid of death. It is coming to a theatre near you. We are all on the same hit list and each one of us is sooner or later going to croak, our soul is going to depart from our body which is going to rot and slowly dissolve into the elements.
We are all going to die and if that shouldn't give us good reason to get up and dance and celebrate this gift called life then I really don't know what's going to get us moving.
Celebrate life and laugh death in the face as she welcomes you in her cold dark embrace and celebrate all the more the new life that awaits you. Even you my darling atheists and agnostics.
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