Food, Freedom & Fashion

A Delicious Green Salad
  We all do it.  We all have to have it.  Without it, 99.9+% of humanity would perish.  What is it?  Food and water!  Unless one is a breatharian, living literally on air, we all eat and drink something some time.  We have likes and dislikes.  Every culture, every nation, every era.  We identify ourselves by our food.  One of the ways to a man’s heart is said to be through his stomach.  We get to know one another by breaking bread.  Having a person at our table is a sign of acceptance and love.  We eat for nutrition, pleasure, community, relaxation, indulgence, habit, compensation, sublimation.

     The best food to eat is the real stuff, which means it’s authentic, organic and holistic.  These days, descriptions of what passes for food has almost spun out of control.  Advertisers play fast and loose with language, seeking to befuddle people.  What is meant by natural?  How can proponents of white sugar call it “natural” when it is a processed product with most of the innate nutritious elements yanked out? What many people eat in this country has become nonfood:  irradiated, genetically engineered-mutilated (genfood, GMO), chemicalized, denatured, toxified, sometimes downright poisonous.  When butterflies die from the effluvium coming from plants such as some of the Roundup Ready (chemically engineered seeds and chemical fertilizer) foods, this is both un-natural and outright dangerous.  “There had been some promotional hype about this type of food being cheaper to grow and feeding the world’s millions, yet examination of this faulty hypothesis shows it to be a lie, created by the very people who would make money by its usage.   Follow the money trail, and see who is saying what about anything.

     Freedom has been the rallying cry of this country since before its inception.  It is ever used to gather and motivate people. Most Americans claim and like to believe that we are the freest people on the planet.  In some ways, this is true.  In others, it is fallacious.  When it is legal to keep food from being labeled as genfood, or GMO, or genetically engineered, so people can make informed decisions, this is an abridgment of our freedom to know, to choose, and to eat healthful, real, delicious food.  Vegetarians and omnivores eating tomatoes, corn or soybeans expect the food’s entire genetic makeup to be that of tomatoes, corn or soybeans.  It is a radical infringement of our freedom, well-being and pursuit of happiness, guaranteed in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, to find we have been eating something that has genetic DNA of insects and other unexpected material within it .

     Throughout mainstream media, fast food has been advertised and promoted as though it’s a fashion or fad.   Big money goes into this.   The mainstream intake of “nonfood” has led to the U.S. being one of the most overweight countries in the country, with more money being spent on diets, exercise and plastic surgery than anywhere else on Earth.  This is due to conflicting advertising, media messages and cultural habits, propagated by faulty thinking.  That adage, you are what you eat, has much truth.   Eat badly, create negative health.  Eat well, create good health.

What is good eating?  Is it a steak, baked potato with lots of butter and sour cream?  Is it a salad with tomatoes and romaine lettuce?  Is it organic food?  Is it pure water?  Does it matter if water contains heavy metals?  Were food plants grown with pesticides, chemical fertilizers?   Did the animal have hormones, chemicals shot into it?  Were chickens running free range?  FIND OUT!!!  It can mean your life.

     How to turn the tide for ourselves, including anyone who has knowingly or unwittingly become a human toxic dump? How to make changes?   Read Genetically Engineered Food by Martin Teitel, Ph. D., and Kimberly A. Wilson, as well as Redesigning Life? The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering, edited by Brian Tokar.  Go to the web.  Ask your grocer/health food store about their food.  Become informed.  Look at your own health.   Look at the people in your community.  With understanding, wisdom and love, notice whether you and yours are healthy, in shape and energized.   If you and yours are in any way lacking in any of this, one of the places to look is what you eat, how you eat, when you eat, why you eat.  All this in addition to your other life routines, including your thoughts and ideas, as well as your emotional patterns.

     How to get ourselves, our country, our planet on track?  Make all this sexy and fashionable.  Make it a sign of maleness to eat and drink healthfully and wear clothing made of natural fabric.  Drop guns and war as a means to prove malehood.  Make creating peace and sustainability the way to go.  Make it erotic.  Make it feminine and alluring to love our planet.  Make Our Mother the Earth a gorgeous logo.  Make Mother Nature an icon, a Goddess.  Make the energy of the feminine as prized as that of the masculine.

     The fast food and tobacco industries used advertising, words and pictures to make it seem fun and sexy to eat junk and smoke chemicalized leaves.  Many people bought it.  Americans spend millions of dollars on nutritiously empty fat-filled calories and on products that have been proven to cause cancer. Since people are going to eat, drink, and, yes, smoke, let us make it healthful, delicious and advantageous to us and the planet.  We are a powerful species.  We can do anything we set out hearts and minds to.  We can create fictitious characters as interesting and inviting as those in the X-People (poetic license).  We can do fashion shows with natural fibers.  We can promote peace as sexy.  Living harmoniously, dancing and singing in a world where people enjoy one another is a great new and timeless fashion.  Let us all be conscious of our personal choices and evolve ourselves into a new kind of sexy.  Now is the time.

–Audrye Arbe