Good Food Gone Bad

Hello. My name is Jackie Verrilli and I'm a packaged-food-aholic. Since everyone says that recognizing the problem is 90% of the cure, I figure I'm almost there. But every day is hard. I am a mom who moves at the speed of light, doing laundry, checking e-mails, and getting the swimming and baseball gear together, all before having my morning coffee. I buy birthday presents, send e-mails to the PTA committee I serve on, and set up play dates for my kids
before noon. I fold and put away the laundry, drive my kids to their play dates/activities/doctor appointments, call my parents, grocery shop, pick up my kids and play Legos with them before dinner. It shouldn't surprise anyone that I am a packaged-food junkie. In a world gone mad with immediate gratification, I can't resist the ease and satisfaction of a toaster pastry, the seduction of a drive-through lunch, or the utter simplicity of a microwaveable bag of green beans, a pre-seasoned turkey breast, and an easily opened and dumped out box of flavored rice. This is how we eat today. This is mein kampf. But I know the solution, I have come to terms with it, and I have even gotten therapy from an expert, and so my struggle continues as I learn how to THROW AWAY FOOD!! There… I said it. That is what we all need to learn to do. It's the only way out.

If we look back into pre-history, our hunter-gatherer forebears ate a lot of meat or fish, fruits, vegetables and nuts. And pretty much nothing else. This is, what… maybe twenty thousand years ago? When every individual in the group had to learn to hunt. They all worked together so that the group could survive. Then about ten thousand years ago, civilizations got organized and individuals started to farm land, domesticate animals and store food. Everyone knew how to grow food in big plots of land and everyone tended the animals and everyone learned to make cheese and cure meat. Then, it all started to go downhill. Once someone figured out that they could farm chickens by themselves in large numbers and trade the excess eggs and meat to people who could butcher hogs or mill wheat. That's when it became "every man for himself." Make no mistake… technology and greed killed the clan.

In the 1960's the phrase, "better living through chemistry" was as top-of-mind as "I'm lovin' it!" is today. Before preservatives and mass quantity food production techniques, it used to take hours to prepare meals. That's what women did with their excess creativity in the 1950's, they cooked. A lot. If you look at a pre-1960's cookbook, you will see elaborate sauce recipes and multi-side-dish meals. Now we watch such meals being prepared on television after we've fed the kids a frozen pizza for the third time this week. This is not an indictment, people, it's a cry for help. I used to cook a lot. I liked to cook. Until my kids finally beat me into submission and I just started serving chicken nuggets, fish sticks, frozen pizza, and hot dogs in a monotonous rotation. We moms used to baste a turkey for hours, make green beans almandine, and whip the mashed potatoes with the new-fangled electric mixer that was such a time-saver. Now, the time-saver is a petro-chemical, a high-tech irradiating or freezing process, or a dielectic heating appliance (microwave oven, a.k.a. nuker). These things were invented to save time, but alas, they were too far ahead of their time, and so, Prozac was invented. Yes, as we moms gained more time to sit and either melt our brains with soap operas or think about our lives post college, we realized that, without a use for our creativity, we got depressed. But no need to worry, chemicals to the rescue!! Yes ladies, I believe that packaged food is a cause of depression, however indirect.

But heavy-duty food processing all started before my time, so I thought it was just the natural order of things to be able to nuke a meal or to store goods in a pantry for weeks before I used them. Before I knew it, I was addicted. "Using" allowed me more time to Facebook and make connections with people I don't really care about. But wellness intervened and now I know that pre-prepared, processed, packaged, chemical-laced, super-refined-sugar-infused foods are simply bad for me. Our once-good foods have turned bad because you can't buy meals in a package that don't have sugar, chemicals or extra fillers in them. Luckily, I had a good friend, a vegan (the aforementioned expert), who told me how to let myself off the hook. "Jackie," she said, "good food goes bad, and when it does, you have to let it go." I finally understood what she meant when I began to throw away spent fresh broccoli. It was soooooo hard to do. I had been taught that throwing away food was a sin akin to murder. My parents never threw any food substance away. They also never signed me up for ballet, gymnastics and piano in the same week. As a matter of fact, they never signed me up for anything and I still went to college, got an MBA and have a successful marriage. WILD!! They also ALWAYS cooked. Nothing had time to go bad because we were always home for dinner, so a week's worth of groceries was gone in a week. FREAKY!!

I have kids that have activities, and they are spoiled beyond all recognition of the old school. I would go for a "fix" whenever they complained. "Yes, I'll make you some mac-n-cheese," even though I just slaved over coq au vin and brown butter orzo. But with my intervention behind me, I am once again cooking for my family when I can. Simpler meals that the kids still don't always eat enthusiastically, but with the bribe of a packaged cookie at the end, they will manage to choke down. Every week, I buy a week's worth of groceries, but since I don't always get the chance cook, every week I end up throwing something that was fresh but that became putrid in the fridge away. I still feel sad when I do it, but I know that it is important for my family's health to have the fresh food available at all times. I believe that I will learn to plan better and so waste less over time. I also have promised myself to buy a composter within the next year. But they tell you not to make too many other changes while you're recovering, and so I'll just have to be patient and forgive myself when the tomatoes get black spots, the raspberries get soft, and the zucchini grow fuzzy. I'm taking every day as it comes and I have internalized the fact that good food goes bad, and that that is okay.