An apple a day…

“You are what you eat.” Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard this from your Mom as she plopped a load of mushy, overcooked, canned carrots on your plate. I remember mumbling, “I’m a gaggy pile of barfy carrots?” To which Mom would reply, “Eat all of those carrots. They’re good for your eyesight. If you don’t, I’ll give you more. Children in India are starving, you know.” My Mom always heaped confused, vegetable related logic upon us. Maybe we know better now. Boiling the daylights out of vegetables is so last century and I can’t believe, to this day, anyone would ever have been hungry enough to eat my Mom’s boiled, mushy, canned carrots. As for the carrots being canned, the truth of the matter is my Mom canned all of our vegetables straight from the garden into the jars and onto a shelf in the basement. So, I guess it could have been worse. We rarely ate commercially canned products or, for that matter, commercially prepared foods in general. We were luckier than most kids, except for the reheating part.

So, it’s with all of the knowledge we’ve accumulated in the last three decades about the benefits of a healthy diet; the importance of perimeter shopping at the grocery store; the avoidance of overly processed foods and shunning of products with chemical preservatives to lengthen shelf life, that I write this week’s blather. While not allergic, I am highly sensitive to many food additives. I get physically ill if I consume a food product containing nitrites/sulphites/ nitrates or edible oil products and, of course, MSG. I am the pain-thearse guest who won’t eat processed foods at a party, a restaurant or family gathering unless I’ve had a good look at the ingredients labelling. I avoid trying “new foods” unless I know how they were prepared, and then, only if I’ve tried and survived unscathed. Even something as innocuous as a sprinkle of dried parsley on a salad or soup can send me into lavatory exile for hours. My days of trying any new edibles, without research have long gone.

My food additive odyssey started on a family road trip to the Maritimes in the early 1980s. We stopped at the Welcome Centre and were invited to have a cup of coffee or a refreshing glass of Tang. After twelve hours in a small car with youngsters, I needed a coffee. I was a cream-and-sugar kinda gal at the time, but Coffee Mate was being offered and I thought I’d give it a whirl. I’d never used the product before, how bad could it be? Coffee Mate was supposed to make a good cup of coffee “taste great.” Within the hour I had developed a migraine headache, frightening chest pain and, later, stomach cramps. When I tried to figure out what the heck happened, I remembered a good friend telling me he always had MSG “heart attacks,” cramps and migraines and I wondered if the non-dairy creamer contained an additive that produced the same symptoms. Research in the early ‘80s wasn’t as easy as firing up the PC and Googling. Product labelling was limited as regards ingredients and additives. I didn’t conduct a sophisticated research project but, after corresponding via snail mail with the Nestle Corporation, my conclusion was to avoid products containing non-dairy/edible oil products.

Over the years, in an effort to address the movement toward healthier food choices and ensure longer shelf life, the culture of food production moved from the field to the laboratory and to the offices of marketing mavens, big time. Food producers/processors didn’t want to lose savvy customers and they began a dynamic campaign to hide the chemicals with intriguing “medical sounding” words. And, now, we’re being chemically enhanced, marketed and PR’d into believing everything food producers toss our way is all-natural, pure, healthy, low in sodium, sugar-free, probiotic and loaded with essential vitamins and minerals, and on and on.

For me, it’s all about “Ait a happle avore gwain to bed, an’ you’ll make the doctor beg his bread.”

theresa@wellingtontimes.ca