YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT
Any health food enthusiast, dietician and a lot of moms will tell you that You Are What You Eat. But what does it mean?? Eat almonds, be a nut? Eat sugar, be sweet? Some suggest it's really the combination of foods that keep you well or kill you quickly. Others believe it's all in the preparation. Well I can assure you that if I get baked or fried on occasion it has nothing to do with how my food was cooked. I'm not exactly a health food nut but I like 'real' food. Not the unreal, not the classic "food products" of my youth -- heavy on the sugar and preservatives light on nutritive value. I'd eat a pop tart but cheese in a can defied logic. And I'm pretty sure it wasn't cheese -- it was cheeze -- whatever that is. Most of it though, even the stuff you'd consider mostly cardboard and plastic -- the kind with a dash of preservatives and food coloring -- believe it or not, that stuff starts out as 'real' food. And I think they have to keep at least a molecule of the real thing in it or they can't call it 'food'. So even if you're happy with mostly fake food you still need the real deal to get it started. Genetically altered crops are supposed to produce more and bigger produce and grain than the au naturale type but I'm not a fan of Frankenfood and frankly I'd take Mother Nature over science any day. She created an impressive system with an obvious sense of balance and I'm pretty sure she worked out exactly what we'd need to keep ourselves going for a very long time. Even Einstein couldn't do that. Scientists are good at observing nature and they've learned to mimic some of her best bells and whistles but genetic alteration seems pretty ambitious. Besides -- do we really need black eyed peas with lashes? Is there room in the market for square rice? Peas without pods? How about blue oranges? We should have stopped at cheeze-in-a-can and left it at that. Growing is such a natural process that growing unnatural things is bond to be a mistake and I think we can do without anything more exotic than blue corn -- which is, in fact, perfectly natural.
If you're a fan of old sci fi movies you might recall that "Soylent Green is people." It's the ultimate in recycling -- processing the human body (corpses) to make a very anonymous meal of unrecognizable, tasteless, mass produced people chow. However dehumanized that might be it's still a pretty gruesome thought and probably a bad idea -- there is a human version of mad cow disease and this is how it gets passed around. We really aren't supposed to eat our own kind unless it's an emergency. Okay -- so eating people is out of the question, we don't have enough room to grow enough food anymore and until someone finally invents that terrific little food fabricating machine they used on Star Trek we're going to have to come up with something entirely new.