So many things

   So many things are swirling around in my mind right now. I just watched the new season of "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution" and was blown away. He is in LA and is meeting major resistance from the LA USD (united school district) to let him even step foot inside any of the schools in the LA area. There was info about flavored milk and how "important" it is to have in schools b/c without it kids won't drink milk as much. Crap. There was shocking info about this stuff called "pink slime" that is a meat-by product filler that is processed with ammonia and put in ground beef to make it go farther. It is estimated that 70% of ground beef sold in the US (in fast food, restaurants, and grocery stores) contain pink slime. The USDA says the process is safe and assures that it maintains high quality of blah, blah, yackey schmackety. What it really is is gross meat bits and shavings that is originally used for dog food, but now is being separated, washed in an ammonia/water mixture, ground up, and put into ground beef. Scary crap. Learning this drives home the need to get beef from a local vendor and not eat burgers from major fast food or restaurants anymore. Ugh. I spent some time looking on the LS school district website to see their nutrition guidelines, menus, and such. I remember the school lunches from when I was teaching and don't think that what we serve our kids in LS is much better. There are healthy choices, but the majority is not. Or I feel that the healthy choices are kind of a mask or cover for not so good food.
  I think I might do a survey of parents I know who have kids in the LS schools and see what they think of the food. It doesn't need to take having a tv show come to your city in order to make changes in the food. Even taking out the flavored milk in the schools would make a difference for better health and less sugar consumption.
  It all comes down to convenience, cost, and ethics. The majority of Americans don't know where their food comes from and they don't care where it comes from, what is contained in it, or what it had to go through to be deemed "edible" as long as it is cheap, fast, and plentiful. That is such a load of crap. Like I've stated before I would rather spend twice as much on a pound of ground beef if I knew where it came from and that it was good quality than whatever is on sale. I think a lot of people would still go for the cheaper meat even if they knew it had pink slime in it....even if they knew what pink slime was. They'd go for it because it is cheap and readily available. There is a mindset in the country that is amazingly negligent when it comes to health, nutrition, and what we need to eat in order to be healthy. I know not everything I eat is the best of the best, but at least I'm working on making better choices and trying to see the bigger picture instead of getting stuck in the "this is what I've always eaten, so don't you dare try to take it away from me" mentality.
  All these things swirling around in my head...massive corruption and deception that go so high in the system and government that it seems that nothing will ever make a difference. A deep seeded psyche and mind-set of Americans who remain seemingly ambivalent to the ethics and process of food production. I have to come back to what I can change and what I can influence and that is what my family eats. We can make choices in supporting companies with ethical practices. We can choose not to support certain companies. We can know where our food comes from as much as we can. That is where I am and will have to stay there and sit in this for a while. Grrr.