What you eat

I just finished reading Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, which I understand everyone else read about four years ago when it was popular, but still, I have things to say about it. If you haven't read it, it is actually a worthwhile read in many places, and definitely not as slow as typical non-fiction. Schlosser is a writer for Atlantic Monthly and does know how to write in a straightforward and intelligently compelling manner. On the other hand, some amount does need to be filtered out through the liberalism filter if you are going to be taking away messages from the book. Lastly, several parts are not for people with weak stomachs and active imaginations.

These disclaimers aside, the main point of the book is obviously to point out the bad practices either directly within the fast food industry, franchising for instance, necessitated by the fast food industry, meat packing conditions, or as a result of the fast food industry, such as obesity. While I heard his messages on these topics, I was actually more disturbed by his statistics on what Americans are choosing to eat. The average American is eating 3 hamburgers and 4 orders of french fries in a given week. When I think about the fact that I never eat hamburgers and eat french fries on the order of once a month, this means there must be an anti-me in the country who is eating 6 hamburgers and 8 orders of fries every week. Someone is knowingly and willingly putting their digestive system and their heart through a lot of scary food. You can blame advertising all you want, there's still something wrong with a society where someone will do this to themselves no matter how sexy or popular it looks on TV.

Although there are plenty of other statistics that make me uncomfortable with the society in which we live (90% of US children eat at a McDonalds every month, the average American drinks 56 gallons of soda a year), the most distressing one was that 90% of the food we eat is processed. Being a health-conscious person, it got me thinking about what I eat on an average day. I don't know what their definition of processed is, but I have to assume it means something not in a form you get from the earth. With that in mind, I had eggs with onions and (processed) salsa cooked in (processed) butter for breakfast this morning along with (processed) soy bacon. Most days I have a (processed) peanut butter and honey sandwich on (processed) whole wheat bread with a (processed) fruit cup. Dinner might involve a spinach salad with (processed) parmesan cheese, (processed) olive oil, (processed) balsamic vinegar, and tomato, accompanied by a main dish like (processed) multi-grain pasta topped with (processed) tomato sauce.

90% of the food I eat may, in fact, be processed, and although I don't think all processed foods are bad for me, the book did make me question my trust in the companies that make them. How do I know they're not grinding up bugs along with the peanuts in my peanut butter? Could cow feces get into the milk supply? Was there harmful bacteria on the tomatoes they used for my pasta sauce? Overall, I was left, as I suppose the point was, feeling like the food industry in general, not just the fast food industry, cannot be trusted. I am the only one who should have control over what goes into my food, unsanitary conditions and all. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to avoid processed food, as even the basic cooking ingredients like sugar and flour are processed somewhere else; I wouldn't know how to make sugar from sugarcane if I tried. Knowing that, I suppose I will continue buying my peanut butter from Peter Pan just like everyone else, but it's never going to taste as good.

Fast Food Nation is a good book at getting its point across; I just wish that point didn't involve me questioning everything I put in my mouth.

Less Impending Doom

Substantially less, actually. I just mailed the deposit on an apartment in St. Marys. You don't want to know how little it costs if you are living in any major metropolitan area. Depending on who you are, you may also not want to know how drunk I am right now. Either way, gaudy 1970's apartment (my shiny, new IKEA furniture isn't going to match):

Maybe I'll vacuum more if I have shag carpeting...

Real Estate and the Impending Doom

A week from today my lease in Lexington is up. While I am quite excited about moving to St. Marys, there is a slight hitch. I don't actually know where I'll be going when I move. I had an apartment all lined up (granted, an ugly apartment), which was then given to someone who would sign a longer lease. As a small town, it is not the kind of place where one can just find another apartment complex, rather one has to go through calling every landlord in town, numbers passed on by word of mouth. This whole process frustrates me, leaving me wondering what the hell I'm supposed to do with a whole apartment full of furniture. When your options are an apartment with no appliances or more days of frustrating looking, do you just settle?

Instead of focusing on my growing moving angst, I've spent the last several hours looking at condos for sale in Boston. I have actually found the condo of my dreams and it's in Dorchester.It's so shiny and open and available. I know that I have no hope of owning such things with moving about for the next year and a half, then going into massive debt with grad school, but, still, I'm lusting after the financial equity and stability of owning a small piece of property. One day this loft will be mine, but until then, I would just settle for a cheap apartment in Elk County.

Happiness vs. the Impending Doom

I have this great feeling of impending doom right now. It's not an especially enjoyable feeling. Instead of thinking about it, I will instead go through the things that are lovely in life.

Family: My family is quite amazing and wonderful. I am now greatly confused as to why I ever went through the teenage rebellion phase, not to mention why I currently live ~1000 miles away from them and will be moving even further in the next two weeks. I took some vacation time at Christmas to go home for a couple days, then travelled to the UK with my family for a week. We all tried to come up with the last time we had gone on an all-out family vacation together and couldn't remember. We started in Edinburgh, Scotland on Boxing day and worked our way down to London for New Year's Eve, consuming much alcohol and good foods along the way. We saw castles and palaces, waterfalls and rolling English countryside. Bath was particularly interesting, while Stonehenge was a bit of a let down. Getting hit on by various Eurotrash at a club in Bristol and having my brother claim to be my fiance was priceless, as was drinking on the tube before the NYE fireworks from the London Eye. An added bonus was going to the Tate Modern museum and discovering five story tall curly slides as an installation art piece.My brother and sister have decided when I buy the large house for all of us to live in we'll get our own set.

Friends:
Simon came to visit and made everything warm and clean. It made getting out of bed for work very difficult in the morning and resulted in a few late arrivals at work, but when you have no boss, it doesn't really matter. It was nice to have someone to come home to in the afternoon, someone else to cook dinner with and someone to talk to in the evenings. It was awesome to have someone to throw a dinner party with and to do random and stupid things. Now if i could only find something to do with 250 bouncy balls.

Funding:
I've been working on a project at work for the last seven and a half months. It finally looks like it's going to get real funding and pick up the pace. Sadly, I'm already training my replacement, so I won't be around to see many of the results of finally getting budgeted, but they are asking that I make it back for the first round of production testing. My replacement, also a function of finally having a budget, seems to be working out pretty well, too.

Squirrels:A squirrel (much like the above) built a nest on my balcony sometime in December, and since I don't use it, I let it stay. While Simon was here, we awoke to a weird noise on the balcony and looked out the blinds to find my squirrel and another squirrel. We could tell my squirrel because it was raining and one squirrel was dry while the other was pathetically wet. The wet squirrel decided to move in with my first squirrel, meaning I now had two squirrels living on my balcony. They are cute and I fear for their nest once I leave the apartment, so Simon and I started to feed them. I'm pretty certain they are my squirrels now. And they're fat.

Now I just need to focus on these happy things.