“Would you like the grilled chicken with seasonal vegetables, or a piece of three layer torte, glazed donuts, and kool-aid?”
For some of us, healthy eating can be challenging, especially with the luscious array of delicacies presented before us on a daily basis. Consider the temptations of soft serve ice cream, multi-flavored potato chips, candies, sweets, sodas, and cheaply flavored alcohol.
Of course, the trick is developing healthy tastes (or do I dare be snobbish and say cultured tastes?). But for people who grew up on trans-fat injected nutrition-stripped white flour pastries . . . well, it can be tough.
So here’s a good trick. Whenever you eat something, have fun with imagining just how it got from its original natural state to arrive on your plate.
Take a Twinkie. (Does anyone actually eat those any more?) Okay. The Twinkie. You’re holding its sponge-like mass in your hand, just about ready to sink your teeth into its creamy center. Now stop, and think about where it came from.
Start in picturesque fields of wheat, glowing in the sun, the wind moving through the wheat stalks like waves on the ocean.
Now comes a big, exhaust-spewing machine, ripping up the wheat plants and separating out the little wheat berries.
Imagine those wheat berries going to the flour factory, where they are pushed through metal cutters and slicers, and all the nasty brown nutritious parts of the wheat are stripped away, until all that is left is the pure, white, gleaming ball of starch in the center. The essence of white flour.
You can imagine the sugar cane going through a similar process.
Meanwhile, some factory has been preparing the innards. The chemists have come out, dumped in the necessary chemicals, stirred in some trans fats (which were once vegetables of some kind, if we are going to believe there are vegetables in vegetable shortening), and a healthy dose of the afore-mentioned sugar. Wala! Squish it into the white flour tube, and we have a Twinkie!
The point is that dwelling on the thought of the chemicals, the metal, the factory . . . this can get unappetizing. As opposed to imagining the journey of your favorite wine, from grapes hand-picked off the vines, squished between the toes of lovely women with perfectly clean bare feet (remember, we’re imagining here), and the juice lovingly poured into oak barrels.
Of course, visualizing any meat-based food can get a bit grizzly, but that’s only if we’re being specist (this is my own word, sort of like ‘racist’). See my commentary on vegetable slaughter to learn more.
Next time you’re tempted by that cheap donut in the grocer’s bakery, take a few moments to visualize its journey. You might just lose your appetite.
