The Cucumber Conspiracy!
Yesterday I bought a salad. One of those salads that you make in a store in one of those plastic containers and they charge you by the pound. A salad bar. Yes, that’s the name for it. Anyway… I ate what I wanted and brought the rest home. I plan to eat the rest of it for lunch today. I had a few salad fixins left over from the last grocery shopping I did. It wasn’t enough to make my own salad at home (plus I was out and had to eat something), but it was enough to augment the left over salad I had and bring it up to a full meal. I tried my hand at gardening this summer and was able to grow a total of 7 big cucumbers. (Hell, I’m proud) I had one on the counter that I cut up and added to the salad. The entire time I was driving to work, I smelled cucumbers and that’s it. Not cucumbers and onions, or onions and beets or any combination of what was in the salad. Only cucumbers. That got me thinking….
When I was a shorty (teehee) my mother used to fry chicken for Sunday breakfast. I am not a big fan of breakfast food but I never complained on a Sunday before church. Fried chicken is something that my family is big on. They treat it like a side dish, never an entrée. Explains these hips, because I loved fried chicken; especially my mother’s. But when I was upstairs getting ready for church, I could smell chicken frying. Then as the years passed, I could smell oil cooking but not the chicken. I wouldn’t know there was chicken in the skillet unless I went downstairs and saw it there. Sometimes Mommie would switch up with salmon croquets or just plain fried fish.
I have said all this to say, that there is something really screwy going on with food. And it just didn’t start in the last few years. I haven’t had my mother’s breakfast chicken since the 80’s. We are all currently aware of the genetically modified concept. What is not so well known is how long they have been screwing around with food. I remember in the mid 90’s, I stopped being able to tolerate corn oil. Everyone thought I was crazy. Including me! But the violent reaction I had to corn oil could not be denied. If I ate anything containing or cooked in corn oil I would vomit. With very little notice I might add. So I had to prepare my own food. Luckily, folks started the move to olive and all vegetable oils and I could venture out again.
My aunt used to raise and kill her own chickens. When she cooked a chicken… It was a different experience than store bought chicken. And it’s not like she would kill a chicken and cook it right then. Not necessarily. She said that was too much work to kill one every time she wanted to eat one. No. Auntie would kill a few chickens and freeze the ones she wasn’t about to eat. And guess what? You could smell chicken cooking in her house in every nook and cranny and in the surrounding yard. Whether the chickens we fresh or frozen.
In 1999 an Islamic friend of mine told me where I could find chicken that would be completely drained of blood. We had been having a food conversation and I mentioned how skeeved I got when I fried or cooked chicken and blood jumped out of it. He claimed to be sending me to a chicken butcher. When I got there I found no refrigerators… but there where chickens running around. Apparently, you pick the live chicken you wanted and the people kill it and dress it for you. My apartment smelled like chicken that night. Even my landlords remarked that they could smell good chicken cooking all up and through their apartments. I couldn’t eat it though my late husband loved it until he found out where and how that chicken came to rest on our table.
People we gotta do better. Think about what it is that you put in your body. If we rely on commercial sources for our food, we are gonna die early. This country has a vested interest in seeing us sick. Because healthcare is one of the only industries it has left. Now I live in the city. And my yard is clay and rocky. But I’m going to do what I have to do in order to make sure that my family and I have a constant supply of fresh produce. I’d like to grow my own food, but if I can’t, I wanna network with other home growers and folks that sell their food on the side of the road. I ain’t shamed to buy their stuff. Since I don’t eat meat anymore I don’t have to kill anything. And that is a messy relief.
Peace.
When I was a shorty (teehee) my mother used to fry chicken for Sunday breakfast. I am not a big fan of breakfast food but I never complained on a Sunday before church. Fried chicken is something that my family is big on. They treat it like a side dish, never an entrée. Explains these hips, because I loved fried chicken; especially my mother’s. But when I was upstairs getting ready for church, I could smell chicken frying. Then as the years passed, I could smell oil cooking but not the chicken. I wouldn’t know there was chicken in the skillet unless I went downstairs and saw it there. Sometimes Mommie would switch up with salmon croquets or just plain fried fish.
I have said all this to say, that there is something really screwy going on with food. And it just didn’t start in the last few years. I haven’t had my mother’s breakfast chicken since the 80’s. We are all currently aware of the genetically modified concept. What is not so well known is how long they have been screwing around with food. I remember in the mid 90’s, I stopped being able to tolerate corn oil. Everyone thought I was crazy. Including me! But the violent reaction I had to corn oil could not be denied. If I ate anything containing or cooked in corn oil I would vomit. With very little notice I might add. So I had to prepare my own food. Luckily, folks started the move to olive and all vegetable oils and I could venture out again.
My aunt used to raise and kill her own chickens. When she cooked a chicken… It was a different experience than store bought chicken. And it’s not like she would kill a chicken and cook it right then. Not necessarily. She said that was too much work to kill one every time she wanted to eat one. No. Auntie would kill a few chickens and freeze the ones she wasn’t about to eat. And guess what? You could smell chicken cooking in her house in every nook and cranny and in the surrounding yard. Whether the chickens we fresh or frozen.
In 1999 an Islamic friend of mine told me where I could find chicken that would be completely drained of blood. We had been having a food conversation and I mentioned how skeeved I got when I fried or cooked chicken and blood jumped out of it. He claimed to be sending me to a chicken butcher. When I got there I found no refrigerators… but there where chickens running around. Apparently, you pick the live chicken you wanted and the people kill it and dress it for you. My apartment smelled like chicken that night. Even my landlords remarked that they could smell good chicken cooking all up and through their apartments. I couldn’t eat it though my late husband loved it until he found out where and how that chicken came to rest on our table.
People we gotta do better. Think about what it is that you put in your body. If we rely on commercial sources for our food, we are gonna die early. This country has a vested interest in seeing us sick. Because healthcare is one of the only industries it has left. Now I live in the city. And my yard is clay and rocky. But I’m going to do what I have to do in order to make sure that my family and I have a constant supply of fresh produce. I’d like to grow my own food, but if I can’t, I wanna network with other home growers and folks that sell their food on the side of the road. I ain’t shamed to buy their stuff. Since I don’t eat meat anymore I don’t have to kill anything. And that is a messy relief.
Peace.
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