Sunday, September 21, 2008

MSG, MSG, Everywhere

There's an idyllic image of pastoral America, a rainbow of vegetables growing just beneath the dirt. These vegetables are the last bits of healthful food in a world overtaken by prepackaged madness, microwavable everything, irradiated beef, and food so highly preserved that our insides are as pickled as the pepperoncinis floating around in a jar of sulfites on the grocer's shelves. Yep, at least we have vegetables.



What's that? What about the vegetables?



Oh yeah, there's fertilizers and pesticides. And now with the advent of a not-so-lovely fertilizer called Auxigrow, there's MSG in the vegetables. There's no washing that off, guys. Ever had a headache just after one of those nasty Gyros from the Greek joint in the mall? How about after Chinese food?



That's because most of us have MSG sensitivities. And for the unlucky few of us, it is a seriously bad sensitivity that causes vomiting, intense headaches, dizziness, and heart palpitations. But since it's not an "allergy" it's not something that has to be labelled appropriately, and the use of it as a fertilizer is mostly unknown.

Auxigrow has been approved for use on almost everything, sending a lot of folks sensitive to MSG into a personal hell of symptoms that they may not even understand. After all, they are innocently consuming the last of the the "safe" foodstuffs, or so they thought.

Farming has morphed into this unrecognizable industry in the last few decades, beyond what anyone has predicted back when Muley sat in remorse on the changing landscape in the Grapes of Wrath. Mechinization, for better or worse, surely transformed the way our produce is brought to the table, but did anyone expect that after that, a virtual chemical warfare would be waged upon the food we eat? It's insane that there is now barely a single edible item in the grocery store that isn't a potential health risk.

Skeptic or not, the further from 100% natural, the more risk we take putting something into our bodies. Hoping that the chemical compounds we ingest won't kill us a little later down the road isn't a bet we should have to make. Why is it so hard to ask for crops grown without more science than dirt, manure, water, sun?

Does anyone else think there is something to the fact that the very same company that makes fertilizer and pesticides also made Agent Orange, which obliterated so much of a nation that it continues to infest the groundwater supply and crops with poison four decades later?

Those chemical compounds really have no business near our bodies. Venturing just a guess, they probably do more harm than good. As for MSG, it's not nearly as devastating as some of the other nasty chemicals, but this skeptic has been bedridden one too many times because of monosodium glutamate.

Vegetables are better when they're just vegetables, damnit.


Skeptically Yours.

Friday, September 12, 2008

To live and die simply, thou shalt not sue me

My father was born in depression era Ohio, essentially handed two pairs of clothes and told to survive. By the time he was about six, he was shooting animals we mostly associate with rabies and roadkill in order to help feed a booming family of ten. His first car was actually a jalopy, and not the kind romanticized by laureate Beats, but the actual kind badly needing the parts he bargained and traded for out junk yards. This jalopy? A Model T. The price? $50. My Dad? 13.

Those were different days. When my father wasn't yet a father and just Herb, just a boy in the late 1940's, he went to jail for speeding and wreckless driving, he ran around without shoes on in junk yards chock full of rusted metal, he handled guns at the ripe old age of six without shooting anyone else or his own eye out, he cut tobacco with giant machetes for 25 cents a week, he ate food better left untouched, he used and reused everything possible, and he lived. And he had a decent job and family, and all of us lived, too.

So what the hell happened in modern times, that people can't get on as well as folks did back then with practically nothing?

What's going on out there? Now, we can't help a mom install a baby seat in her car because if she wrecks, and the infant is hurt, she can sue the company, the individual, and probably the employee that walked by and smiled as the installation was occurring. Why? 'Cause we can't have any forgiveness or moreoever, any culpability. Everyone points fngers and wants a safety net.

Guess what? We don't have a safety net guys, and my dad has some scars, and he made some mistakes, but his photo books are thick, his memory is great, his stories are long and hysterical, he knows everyone in town and moreover, he's 77 and he's never sued anyone. He's had an engine dropped on his back, a machete through a vein, and a host of other accidents. But there's the rub, eh? Accidents. They were accidents.

The point? He learned to live LIFE. No lawsuits, no stupid grudges and no time for wasting time. He still had fun, he was still wreckless and wild, but he chose to just live, and live simply.

The birth of the Large Hadron Collider should have everyone considering a lot of the big questions about life. Read about it? It's an amazing piece of work, and sounds more Star Trek than reality. It's either the machine that will propel us to the next level of scientific research, or destroy the world, depending on who you listen to. The experiments to discover what makes up mass, and searching for the answers about the Universe right after the Big Bang are useful and exciting. On the other hand, it could begin creating blackholes or worm holes and destroy us all (complete drivel, this philosophy).

In moments like these, it's wise to consider what really matters---lawsuits, money, pitiful and and pathetic squabbling that reduce us to the common and base elements of our most vile nature? Or the simple things, those things that taught my father about surviving, laughing, family and frugality? Thinking about the end of the world should make us want to forget about all of the vindictiveness, the time ill spent with creating dividers and boundaries. As science explores the tiniest frontiers of matter, and these miniscule protons smashing into each other, shouldn't we spend time on our own human frontier trying to explore our own relationships or interactivity?

The disappearing facets of what we are, who we are----those are the things that we would miss the most should we be without them. No one would ever say, "I should have sued him when I had the chance" if they had only 4 seconds left. Leaving the legacy of human beings for another society of beings should be something we think about, just in case.

I hope that should the LHC destroy us, but somehow leave a legacy behind, it forgets the lawsuits, the pettiness, the destruction and the waste. I hope that it remembers the souls like Herb. Resourceful, simple, able to subsist from the Earth and with the Earth, beside his fellow man, working with his fellow man, and finding joy in the smallest things.

The world is in a collossal shit lagoon. People are awful to each other, committing treachery just because. This is not the state in which the world should end. If it ends, it should be in a massive hoorah, take no prisoners, party like it's 1999 type of way. Even if the LHC isn't sending us into a stream of strange matter, remember this: life is short, doomsday machine or none. When you find yourself wasting time with petty vindictiveness, pondering a lawsuit, or whittling your time away by doing something soul-crushing, picture the LHC. Even if it's harmlessly sending little protons around in a giant circle beneath the Franco-Swiss border, it's enough to make you want to live life without the bullshit.

Skeptically Yours.