We shop the outside aisles at the grocery store. It’s healthier, and it’s cheaper if you plan for it. It’s also apparent in a number of studies that the ultra-processed foods we eat are shortening our lives while they enrich the sick-people business.
There are times when time itself is the adversary of healthy eating. This life we have designed for ourselves, or allowed to be designed for us, is geared toward driving places to make money and spend it. When we are finally at home, the chores and distractions conspire to idle most of that expensive remodeled kitchen in favor of the microwave.
Tracey and I don’t own a microwave. Questions about what it did to our food were a part of the decision, but the science is not definitive except where plastic is involved. The biggest concern was the kind of food we would buy to cook in it: Tiny portions of expensive, chemical-laden factory food.
We don’t miss the microwave. The kettle boils water almost as fast, and reheating food is a cinch with a steamer. I’m partial to Jamie Oliver recipes to get something delicious out of the kitchen quickly and easily so I can get back to my chores and distractions.
Sometimes, however, the belly button starts to rub against the backbone when you’re far from home and there’s not a Chick Fil A in sight. An American entitled to immediate gratification can’t wait to drive 20 miles home to eat when his hunger pangs have escalated to ravenousness and the emptiness of desire.
And so it was that we decided to pull into the drive-through and order the things that looked best in the pictures. The chicken club I ordered looked huge on the menu, to match my huge appetite, and it came with tater tots and a high-fructose corn syrup beverage, which I declined but they charged me for anyway.
What I received fit into the palm of my hand, and I mean with hand leftover around the entire circumference of the greasy little ball. They used to call such a thing a “slider,” but in the ongoing upgrades to our language, it’s now sold as a sandwich, and priced accordingly. There was surely enough grease for it to slide, but the little slab of leather was more of a choker than a slider.
How many chickens does it take, one wonders, to make chicken leather? Quite a few, I would imagine, but not so many when you add meat extract, emulsifiers, hydrolyzed protein, FD&C Yellow, beaks, lips, toenails and trade secrets. I wasn’t quite able to bite through a portion to chew, and the entire little doorstop slid out of the bun to hang over my lip while I was driving.
The whole meal, or as much of it as I was able to choke down, tasted of despair, from the desiccated poultry byproduct to the cold, greasy little fried potato extracts. It was the same despair I saw in the eyes of the workers at the drive-through window, beyond caring in their sweaty uniforms stepping on fries that littered the floor as they milled around. We were the only customer. The restaurant has only been open a couple of months.
It’s one of the reasons I avoid processed foods. The despair at the drive-through was easy to see, but you can’t see it in the entire food chain from the factory farm to the processing plant. It’s the despair of people working long hours in uncomfortable jobs for shrinking dollars with just enough time and money leftover to feed their families chicken leather from a drive-through window.
The food supply chain is not the only place where despair has settled. You can see it in the quality of goods and services everywhere, and in the struggle of working people to make ends meet.
Despair is the issue on the ticket this November. Politics is just the pictures on the menu. The real contest is economic, and the choice is not between Democrats and Republicans; it’s between globalists and nationalists.
The globalists have had the upper hand for some time, and their numbers have included Democrat and Republican administrations, though the Republicans preferred a global empire with an American brand. Both parties are ineffective, out of touch, corrupt, but until recently their underlying goals have been similar.
Then came Trump, the black swan event. For all his faults, and there are many, Trump is a nationalist. He is a symptom, rather than a primary cause of despair. If you take a look around the world without the filters of politics, you can see Trumps popping up in many places as the failures of globalism, of concentrated, centralized power have raised despair to actionable levels.
Globalism is multinational corporations and the erasure of national boundaries, redistribution of wealth and centralization of power. It is drive-through windows and microwaved meals in plastic boxes. Globalism is war with Asia over who gets to be in charge of the Federation. Nationalism, for all its potential jingoism and regional conflicts, is home-cooked with local farm products from family farms, mom-and-pop stores, and distributed power.
In my view from the drive-through, globalists grew up watching Star Trek and dreamed of a planet-wide “Federation” where the problems of hunger, poverty and inequality have all been vanquished. They forgot that the essential ingredient for the Star Trek utopia was the free and unlimited energy which made it all possible – free and unlimited energy which we do not have.
I think they would have benefited more, perhaps from watching Soylent Green. I wonder if that sandwich really was chicken…
Outside The Box 