In this day and age, with our stores filled with pretty packages it is easy to get caught up in the convenience of purchasing readily available items without thinking about what actually goes into them.
Do you buy diced tomatoes instead of dicing your own? Canned peaches? How about chicken noodle soup? Frozen pizza? Spaghetti sauce?
Did you know those cans are lined with BPA? Do you know the regulations that exist allowing an acceptable amount of fly eggs, rat hairs, mammalian excreta, mold and more to make its way into those pretty prepackaged items lining the shelves? Sure sometimes not knowing is easier, but when it comes to the food you eat, you can never be too careful...the food you consume is what keeps you alive and helps to determine how much time you will enjoy on this Earth.
Run on over to the FDA's site and check out the USDA's Defect Levels Handbook for a glimpse of what they call "levels of natural or unavoidable defects in foods that present no health hazard for humans." They may not be hazardous, but they definitely are gross!
Take a good look at your local store. The fresh produce is usually on one side, while the frozen produce line the other side....and everything in between is mostly pretty packages of junk. Try sticking to the outer sections and you will provide your body with the kind of nutrients it was meant to refuel with and avoid the junk that will gunk it up.
Check out this New York Times Op-Ed piece The Maggots in Your Mushrooms for more on what is in the food you eat...my favorite part of this article: "In case you’re curious: you’re probably ingesting one to two pounds of flies, maggots and mites each year without knowing it, a quantity of insects that clearly does not cut the mustard, even as insects may well be in the mustard. "
