What You Don't Know Can Hurt You

Fried Chicken cooked in Crisco with gravy made with Gold Medal Flour, Sweet tea make with Pure Cane Sugar and fresh potatoes mashed with Plains Dairy Milk and Country Crock spread. One of my favorite meals my mother would cook. As I grew up and became my own cook, I did the same. From an early age, I learned the brands she preferred and I bought them too. Never a thought crossed my mind that the companies I was doing business with had anything other than my best interests at heart. A huge mistake that many people have made as well.

As I wandered the aisles of a grocery store in the UAE and found some of my favorite brands, a sadness like I have never known came over me.
In the US so many of my favorite brands have gone to the dark side. Guided or prodded by the lure of money, the corruption of government by giant companies that are changing our world right under our noses while we were not paying attention to it or reading the labels on our food products. Now we let them stuff us full of corn syrup grown from the worst grade of corn in the world. We are choked with corn syrup sugars in most of the products we ingest, and many of the ones you would least expect.

After some friends told me about how all of the sugar beets in the US are now genetically modified and they only buy organic sugar now, I decided to check out the local sugar packaging. Sure enough, all of it is organic, made from sugar cane and not from anywhere near the USA. A local woman asked me why I wasn't buying the sugar but I was reading the bag, she was scared to buy it because I didn't. I explained I didn't need sugar, I just wanted to know what was in it and where it was from. She looked at me like I was crazy as she plopped the bag of sugar in her basket.

The green signs above all the produce announced their country of origin... Tunisia, North Africa, Australia, and India, to name a few. My thoughts flit from one scenario to another as I look for basics to get back in the groove after my month long holiday. Everyone asked me how long I would stay overseas when I was in the US and I couldn't honestly answer. I am almost scared to return to the US, and I am very comfortable where I am. Yet I continue to plan on making a home in my hometown upon my return.

I prefer this cleaner world, that is not so clean. The fruits and vegetables don't look perfect or stay fresh for weeks, but they taste so good. They contain only what Mother Nature intended and they haven't been "changed" by a corporation who just wanted to make money off the hard working farmers who grew the produce.

Money is the root of all evil, and it will be the end of us as a Nation in the US of A. Fight, fight for your lives, for what is right, for a better world and not the one we have let a select few choose for us. Don't wait, don't sit and let someone else do it. Even if it is small, do something.