Facepalm

I keep having the same problem in the grocery store. Every time, never fails. I push my buggy (Yes, I live in the South, we have buggies here instead of carts) to the register and some high school kid asks me for my silly rewards card. I swipe it and soon the parade of comical facial expressions begins. Why am I getting funny looks at the register? Well, I am buying produce. gasp! 

Let's play a little game here. In your head I want you to quickly name all the flavors of Dorito's chips. Now think about the menu of your favorite fast food chain. Can you name at least 10 menu items from that chain and others you frequent? Can you tell me your favorite "coffee" from Starbucks? You can probably do all of those and more without having to think too hard.

Now think of what a parsnip looks like. Too easy? How about a rutabaga or kohlrabi. 

Apparently these are foreign foods because the cashiers in my town don't seem to know what they are. I bring my foods to the register and they stare at me like I have just smuggled in items that they don't sell. Where I to ask them to find a sauce, box of something or some other shelved item they can direct me to the exact spot without hesitation. If I try to ring up produce other than carrots or salad bags, I am a strange customer. 

This is how it went:
Cashier: Stares intently at food in hand. Makes strange faces while trying to decipher what must be a code generated by the German Enigma machine. Gives up and looks at me for help. "Ma'am, what is this?"

Me: Stares, incredulously. "That is a sweet potato."

Cashier: "Oh, ok." Scrolls for the register number for sweet potato.


Seriously kid, you had to look up a friggin' sweet potato. I thought this was the South. I leave both amazed and saddened. I figured that I had an isolated incident and it could be blamed on the youth of the cashier. Boy was I wrong. 

The next shopping trip- Older lady (50s)- didn't know what rhubarb was. Didn't know what to do with it.

Another trip- Lady in her 30s didn't know what a spaghetti squash was. Asked her coworker who shrugged his shoulders. They guy in line behind me, about 55ish, asked me what I do with that "yellow thing." I said that you can make a pasta with it and use it instead of the wheat noodles. He said he was sure it was healthier but it seemed like a lot of work for the same result. -Same result? Seriously? Think I am just having bad luck? The Jamie Oliver food experiment had the same results. Watch here.  

All of this has led me to start snooping into peoples carts when I go through the stores. It has become a game to try to count to 5. Here is how this works. You walk into the grocery store and are usually thrust into the produce section. Some people pick up an item or two but then they bee line for the rest of the store. My game is to try and find a cart in the store that has at least 5 produce items in it. Most days I leave the grocery store with no successful counts. Consider that most families shop once or twice a week. That means that the average family is eating less than 5 unprocessed pieces of fruit or produce a week. It astounds me. I have literally trained my brain to see ingredient lists for hazards because of our son's health. When I look at an item I scan the label for potential harm and categorize it as potential food or as poison. If you remove gluten, soy and corn alone, the vast majority of every grocery cart you see will be filled to the top with poison. That is being generous. If you remove dairy, it will be even worse. 

This is Powder. He is a Khao Manee  who thinks
 he is human.

As obesity rates continue to march us towards our deaths, even our pets are getting fat. According to the PR Newswire, "Association for Pet Obesity Prevention (APOP) found 52.5 percent of dogs and 58.3 percent of cats to be overweight or obese by their veterinarian. That equals approximately 80 million U.S. dogs and cats at increased risk for weight-related disorders such as diabetes, osteoarthritis, hypertension and many cancers." 

Our son is spending the day laying low because I left the gate open to the cat food area and he crawled faster than I could run. Being a precocious little adventurer, he immediately grabbed two handfulls of the forbidden fruit and shoved it in his face. Que paniking mom. I fan faster than a Kenyan to get to him but was too late. He had touched the gluten containing fast food and was on his way to being sick. I swept his mouth out and washed his hands quickly but within an hour he started to have red spots from his dermatitis herpetiformis. (The Celiac rash)

This is Rocky. You will never see him unless
it is 5 am  and he is dropping things on your
 face because he wants food NOW. 

It occurred to me as I was chastising myself for letting my little one get near the devil's grains that my cats did not evolve eating wheat. Maybe a little grass, some cat nip now and then but not grains. Animals in the wild are constantly being credited/blamed for the deaths of every wild critter around them. My cat Sam once took out a whole squirrel family and beamed with joy at her work. She even brought me a souvenir  How sweet. So the question is, why are we feeding our cats whole grains? The lie that we need to eat a diet loaded with these "great grains" has even reached our pets. 

So, our pets, livestock and family are all eating corn and gluten. Who is eating the food? Apparently the wild animals are. I have a feeling they are going to out live us for sure. You can't outsmart nature by applying fancy patents or chemical names. In the end it is still poison, just neatly packaged and beautifully marketed.