Dec 28, 2010

Dear obnoxious self-appointed food police: eat me.


Today my post is about the food police. Not necessarily the same idiots who want/wanted to ban Happy Meals in San Francisco, as opposed to say, not eating that kind of crap. The ban got vetoed, by the way--probably right around the time people started realizing that it was stupid.
By the way, the attitude that it’s “too hard” to buy healthy food and cook it for your kids is not a valid excuse for demanding that local legislation be passed to ban whatever you think is making them fat. Disagree? Ok, riddle me this:
1. Who is buying the junk food for the chubby bebes, O ye concerned parents of the year?

2. Eating healthy is difficult--the finding, the buying, and the cooking. I speak from experience. If you want to stick with it, then you suck it up and find a way. If you don’t, then get used to buying your toddler clothes from the hefty kids’ store. Very simple.

No, this blog post is about the members of the organically-minded community who feel the need to instill their values in others--by insulting them.
Granted, this isn’t far removed from what I myself do, except that I’m not necessarily trying to convert people. Rather, I am being my usual snarky self.
You’re welcome. Truly, I have smiled upon you this day.

Now, one of my lengthy fore-forewords:
I was raised by my grandma and my mother. These two women were convinced that any non-organic anything that passed the lips of anyone anywhere was going to give the person cancer or some other terrible disease. I have, at the time of writing this, lived a bit over two decades on this little mud ball and have never had a doughnut or a Big Mac, and I have only used commercial food coloring once. I eat whole wheat. I eat organic food in general about 96% of the time. I’m about a dress size 4 or 6.
But I’m not a damn food Nazi. A grammar Nazi yes, but food, nein.

The whole thing got kicked off when I saw these:


Are they not beautiful, readers? Are they not the most adorable rainbow pancakes you have ever seen? Damn right they are.

Then I saw this post later, titled “Things Successful Bloggers Do.
Now, one of her quoted comments from a hate-commenter comes from who I can only imagine is an extremely phobic person involved the words, “I am screaming in fear [because of the food coloring].”

Darling. M’dear.
If you have ever used cheddar cheese that is yellow-orange, it has a colorant in it. If you have ever eaten a food that has any sort of color in it at all, you are eating a colorant. Your toothpaste, if it is other than pure chalky white, has a colorant in it. Granted, the phobic fruitcake who left the aforementioned comment was referring specifically to chemical colorings, which are indeed linked to things like ADD, etc, in children.
However, if you have lived long enough to reproduce and officially be a organic-minded parent yourself and you still don’t know about the growing amount of natural food colorings out there--that have been out there for at least the last 10 frickin' years--go right ahead and hand over your “Self-Appointed Total Food Awareness Guru” card. Yep, pass it forward.
And seriously, “screaming in fear”? From rainbow pancakes? Let’s hope you’re never confronted with some kind of minor catastrophe, or your head might explode from the sheer terror of it all.

I’d also like to point out that a lot of kiddies who are raised by these fear-mongering obsessives (what I like to call the “crazy” side of the community) leave the nest and immediately gorge themselves on junk food.

Most interesting (read: made me want to slap them) comment on her original pancake post?

“Gre-e-e-a-a-at. Trick the little tykes into consuming as much of this worthless nonfood as possible. Bunches of sugar and other empty carbs, cholesterol, etc. Gotta get a jump start on that diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and stroke.
Gee - you oughta be nominated as be Mother of the Year.”


Ahem.
Dear self absorbed jackass that goes by the screen-name-of-”wizard”:

Firstly, it’s buttermilk pancakes. Not something you should gorge yourself on, but still.
She states she puts one or two drops in the recipe. She also provides a link to the recipe that she used, which contains...
Wait for it...
A whole tablespoon of sugar! YE GODS!
Why, with children eating pancakes (with flax seeds in them) roughly the size of my fist (seriously, that's around how big they look compared to the fork in this photo), perhaps as often as once a month, that is a sure track to diabetes and woe! There will be cancer! Wailing! Gnashing of teeth! Possibly sad musical montages!
Or not.
Granted, children are much more sensitive to chemicals than adults are, which would be why food colorings would affect them so much. But the key thing to bear in mind is that not much coloring was used in the recipe and they aren’t eating it that often.
More importantly, if Rachel’s anyone to go by, kids with ADD may well grow up to be goddamn geniuses. So snarf those pancakes, kiddies.
I kid. Mostly.
Also, kids that are fit (and evidently they are) are reducing their risk of stroke, etc, just by not sitting on their butts all day.
Plus, it’s been argued that eating a (moderately sized) breakfast of carb-a-riffic goodness may actually prevent:
“...many of the dangerous symptoms of metabolic syndrome.
Metabolic syndrome is a constellation of symptoms that includes abdominal obesity, high blood pressure, insulin resistance and high triglycerides. It frequently leads to full-blown diabetes, and even when it doesn't, it puts you at significant risk for heart disease.”

Sure, it’s mostly based around mice, but we’re talking about active children here. Going by the descriptions and the picture on the left side of the blog, you can put them on a wheel out in the yard and they run around like they’re on speed happy little monsters angels.
In closing, Amanda isn’t a bad mother. Her kids look happy and healthy in their pictures, she obviously loves them with every cell in her body, and frankly, it’s none of your damn business if she wants to give her kids rainbow buttermilk pancakes once in a multi-colored moon or not.
Overly judgmental ass.

Smooches,
Mary

2 comments:

  1. I stand in awe of your good sense-itude when experiencing the idiocy of everyday extremists.

    ReplyDelete

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