There are hash browns on the stove and their hiss mixes with the commotion of Trill and Rob heading outside. The hash browns have an interesting story. The first time we bought them we liked them. But I’m an obsessive label checker. It’s nearly impossible to buy food with me unless it’s a whole food. If it’s not a vegetable or fruit or something wholly itself then I painstakingly analyze the label. How much sugar does it have?
I flip the hash browns.
What kind of crappy ingredients does it contain? Were the vegetables grown in some monoculture with plants starved for nutrients in dead soil so that you have things like paltry pale tomatoes? Was the love of a farmer there the entire time? Watching it grow. Casting his own shadow over it. Or did spiritless machines strip it?
I’ve been working on small organic farms for 2 years now. I’ve observed how 8 seperate small farms run their operations. Some sell out at farmers markets, some ….
I flip the hash browns again.
… have left over supplies that they feed to their chickens. Some are organized. Some are a mess. Some are young farms. Some are old ones. Some are leaders while others might not be. But there’s a dream. Something motivates each one to live the way they’re living and that’s an amazing thing to see. Strong proactive people with dreams using their time, their one precious life, to create something so necessary. Food. Nutritious food. Bright vividly sweet tomatoes, strong powerful potatoes dug by hand from dark tilthy earth or greens that taste delicately buttery or spicy. Real flavor that makes you truly enjoy your food. Flavors that satiate the craving you didn’t even know you had for tastes outside the monotone static of sugar. No, truly, it’s empowering. Every youth should put their sweat into farming for at least one summer of their lives. Gain the appreciation of their food that our ancestors had. The understanding that it is critical to our survival even as it seems in such abundance to many of us now. Would you know where to get your food if there were no stores?
Shit. I sort of burnt the hash browns.
Back to them. The first time we bought these hash browns I read the ingredients and ignited to Rob about the fact that they have BHT in them (aka Butylated hydroxytoluene, which just sounds bad but I’m no biologist, I’ve only read reports of the possibility of endocrine issues, cancer risks, and so forth). So as I am sometimes inclined I wrote a short email to the customer satisfaction department. I believe in this case that I wrote a letter since they were a smaller company and I couldn’t find an email.
In that letter I told them about how I liked their product but that unfortunately I could no longer buy it. It didn’t fit with my values for food quality because of it’s use of the preservative. And so I forgot about it and haven’t bought them since.
Until out here on the road, their convenience reminded us of them. How much easier breakfast would be. In passing we checked their familiar label and found that it was not familiar. They had changed the preservative.
At first I was really excited. Wow. Maybe they’re actually a good company and got rid of BHT because of my letter. But what is this new ingredient, the preservative they chose to replace BHT.
Sodium Bisulfite. Rob looks it up and reads off some info about it which he quickly finds online. He reads off issues like that it possibly causes birth defects and that people with sensitivities to it can have acute reactions. Not many studies have been done. There are questions about it’s links to cancer. He even found that the New Jersey Department of Health put out warnings of the health hazards to employees of preservative factories (check it out here: http://nj.gov/health/eoh/rtkweb/documents/fs/1685.pdf ). Yeah I guess that’s a thing.
So then why put it in my food? I suppose it’s the trade off for the convenience verses the effort and time it takes to just make the hash browns from scratch. In order to keep those quick to prepare hash browns from going bad we’ve found preservatives. So it comes down to, is it worth it? Is the convenience worth putting yourself at the potential risk of the preservatives used? It’s a question I might answer differently at different times.
Anyways now those hash browns are done and growing cold in the fogged up interior of the cluttered van that we happened to park down by a river.
As always the photos are straight out of my life (you see what I saw).