Learning about edible plants (and eating them) has given me a lot of insight into the problems with the USAmerican food system
It's incredible how a supermarket gives you the sense of being surrounded by immense variety, but it's just the visual noise of advertising. In reality almost everything around you is just corn, wheat, soy, and milk, repackaged and recombined and concealed and re-flavored using additives, over and over and over again.
I'm also 10 billion times more Done with honest conversations about food having been totally obliterated by diet culture, the repugnant American emphasis on "personal choice," fatphobia, and veganism-the-ideology
The problem is not that Americans don't want to eat vegetables something something burgers obesity mcdonald's
The problem is that like 95% of the calories we PRODUCE in this country come from the same 6 or 7 crops/livestock that are easiest to minimize human labor in the production of, through automation and industrialization.
Americans eat so much ultra-processed food because it is easier for a corporation to shove a bunch of corn through 5 machines in a factory and dump additives in it, than to pay farmers and laborers for the highly skilled labor of raising a wide variety of crops and cultivars with the personal, non-mechanical, human attention that is required to grow every crop that you can't just floor with a combine harvester
Americans don't eat vegetables and fruits because vegetables and fruits in supermarkets are all of cultivars that taste like ass because they are bred to produce a lot (profitable) and be able to sit on a shelf for weeks after having the crap beat out of them being shipped in a truck. They're usually picked prematurely (so they can sit on a shelf for weeks) meaning they're unripe, mealy and sour, and half of them are approaching "actively rotting."
The main "plant based" meal that is served at almost any restaurant is a "salad" which means iceberg lettuce that looks like it was dragged across Texas by a bungee cord in a styrofoam cup of ice
We cannot make-better-choices our way out of just not having a variety of good quality food. Sure you can try to hork down the flaccid carrot sticks and strawberries that taste like pee on a tarp at a strawberry farm, but if you pretend to enjoy it everyone can see the pain in your eyes
It should be so damning of our food system that so many people legit think sugar is basically cocaine and that having access to candy and ice cream desensitizes your taste buds because they're being overwhelmed with an "unnatural" stimulus.
Buddy. You just...rarely have access to fruit that's actually fresh and ripe. Strawberries and apples aren't "sweet" in your head because the ones you've been eating usually taste like aquarium gravel.
That's so sad.
I'm just saying that one time I was lucky enough to eat ripe pawpaws in the woods still haunts me and I'm craving them just thinking about it
And sometimes you are lucky to pick up a perfectly ripe fruit from the walmart and those fruits are the fruits that live in your longing fantasies forever.
I literally still think about this one pineapple that I ate like 4 years ago I'm not even joking
I need y'all to know that "food you grew yourself tastes sooooooo much better" is not a metaphor for how hard work makes something more satisfying it Really Does Taste Way Better
Having developed MCAS, I can also say that it's INSANE how much those cheapest and least labor intensive foods are in everything.
This is my allergy list (needs to be updated too):
Peppers
Meat
Dairy
Eggs
Strawberries (OAS)
Gluten**
Corn**
Dye
Canola Oil
Sunflower Oil
Safflower Oil
Cottonseed Oil
Sesame Oil
Grapeseed Oil
Peanuts
Marcona Almonds
Green is rarely an ingredient, orange is middling, and red is in EVERYTHING.
I can't take injectable testosterone, too, because I'm allergic to every carrier oil. I just found out my meds all have dye or corn in them, except for my antihistamine. Regular Benadryl literally has red 40, the most common dye allergen!
I know it's only tangential to the point but like... beyond the fatphobia and diet culture stuff (which as a fat person I've been hit hard by and even abused over) it's also deeply ableist. They keep using the cheap options in everything that a lot of people are actively endangered by because they're passively eugenicist. Profits matter more than lives, so why would they bother making their food safe for any portion of the population but especially disabled people?
Anyway yeah, I'm also unlucky enough that I can't eat many fruits and veggies and even less processed grains, but I'd have so many more options if they'd just stop putting those few ingredients in EVERYTHING.
Damn yeah. Learning that Amaranth makes edible grains that are gluten free and can be made into flour or whatever you like made me so mad because when I looked it up it's like...a speciality health food ingredient
Like??? Amaranth is LITERALLY our worst agricultural weed. It's resistant to every herbicide we can invent because of our relentless attempts to destroy it. Easiest crop to grow on Earth because that shit REFUSES TO DIE. Amaranth is traditionally symbolic of Immortality and there's a reason for that.
The weed versions are different from the species that have been domesticated specifically for food, but they're still 100% edible and we have crap like CRISPR now, if Native Americans brute-forced teosinte into corn without the ability to even see by what means genetic information is stored and transmitted, we can make the seeds a bit bigger come on now