Consumer Kvetch Rave #1

(Maybe I should start mentioning "rave" in all my blogentries. I hear the kids enjoy "raves", perhaps they will find me on Google when looking for another one. Then I put on ads for glo-sticks and make a fortune. Anyway, here is the rave, or blogentry, a new word I thought I just coined, except that it already has 70,000 hits on Google. But has anybody else pronounced it with the soft "j" sound yet, making it a general term for "the art of blogging"? OK OK, here it is, remember the title is Consumer Kvetch Rave #1...)

Artificial preservatives I kind of understand. Who hasn't savored the pleasure of eating eighteen month old pickles out of the jar? Personally, I thought the vinegar was supposed to do the trick, but hey, let's add a little Polysorbate 80 for good measure! Who says it causes cancer? And, hey, not everything is pickled to begin with. Personally, I'd rather eat fresh food (or merely 12 month old pickles), but OK OK, I understand. It might kill me down the line, but for now it saves me the horror of opening up the package and having something green and hairy walk out of it.

But artificial color and flavor I do not understand. Yuk! With those nice, bright colors, now I'm seeing with my own eyes the laboratory chemicals you're feeding me, which makes me feel the cells turning and multiplying into a deadly mass somewhere inside my body. But the FDA doesn't outlaw anything anymore, at least not when there's major corporate backing. And hey, Mr. Moderate doesn't really have cancer, he's just suggestible, hypochondria runs in his family. He's as healthy as an ox, and we feed livestock this stuff all time. And, oh, BTW, let's give an extra big dose of that to children, they love colorful stuff. What a great idea.

Artificial flavor? I get to smell and taste the test tube's contents, too? Oh boy! No, give me something real so I can have an ingredient list that doesn't make me scratch my head. How much could a half a teaspoon of real vanilla extract cost you, better yet the real bean, which should be cheaper because it hasn't been poked, prodded and "extracted" yet?

And, oh, BTW, I can add my own 800 mg of sodium if I really want, and you can keep the fraction of a cent you saved by leaving it out, instead of charging me 50 cents extra for being forced to continue storing it in your warehouse and making you print "low sodium" on the label. The same goes for the pesticides you didn't have to use on the head of organic broccoli that I splurged for, thinking I might actually get that fifteen seconds of added life from broccoli and not have it get cancelled out by sprays. No, I'm not libelling your *%#$ sprays and all those other chemicals, just, er, expressing my involuntary, knee jerk moderate response to them. But you all corporate interests are probably going to sue me anyway. Well, you'll be squeezing blood from a turnip. Of course, if it's a GMO (genetically modified organism) turnip, anything is possible. But that's another blogentry.

I WANT REAL FOOD! I AM CONSUMER, HERE ME ROAR! MAKE THAT "RAVE"!