Things wot I Made Then Ate: January 2019

We Americans prefer light miso. It's what sells from all our grocery store shelves and it's what South River miso says sells the best.

It's a thing with us. Light beer, low fat milk, low fat dressings, low fat everything, artificial sweeteners. Weird huh?

Go ahead and make fun of us. We don't care.

Acknowledged as the fattest nation on Earth yet so incredibly health conscious with gym memberships, home gym equipment, exercise nuts jogging and cycling around all over the place, extreme sports and every diet indulgence ever invented embraced with total commitment, body building, body shaping, billion dollar industries surrounding the shape and weight of our bodies, and yet we prefer the least challenging foods, white bread, less hot chile peppers, less spicy foods.

Mildest of miso.

It's the least salty.

Presented with stronger miso we go, "Ew, gross" because of the salt.

Just a few days ago two women rejected the better stronger much more expensive cheese in favor of its younger less challenging and less expensive version from the same Amish company. Both cheese rather strong, both excellent, but the women prefer the weaker version. One woman is native American and the other woman is Latina. I think. Still, whatever, it's a thing with us.

And after all that, still fat.

It's taking f-o-r-e-v-e-r to sink in and become internalized that it's our advanced agriculture techniques on massive scale, our advanced transportation, advanced storage and marketing, our advanced chemistry altogether that's making and keeping us fat and leading directly to all kinds of health issues. The litany is impossibly long.

And when we stop it, as individuals, these things tend to clear up. You start noticing, *points* that's not really good food. And *points* that's not really good food. And *points* that food is too processed. And, I can do better myself using raw ingredients. While even the raw ingredients are processed through means of advanced society, selected, grown, fertilized, sprayed protected, stored, packaged, transported all by advanced techniques. Not altogether bad but not altogether good either, and in the end disadvantageous to our collective health.

This subject is very long. It's nearly impossible to get back to nature without growing your own food for yourself.

You'll notice this with YouTube videos of people showing their Instant Pots. They pour processed ingredients into them to speed up their cooking and in the end nothing is gained.

The pots are very good for things like making your own soup stock and tomato sauces from scratch, but instead, commercial processed versions of those things are used as ingredients, with their emulsifiers and stabilizers and flavor enhancements and additional sugar and salt, because the owners of the pots haven't yet learned to think not beyond but behind the mass produced versions. It's all that they know. The products were already here when they were born while the farm is nowhere in sight.

And when the farm is in sight there is hardly anything to see except vast stretches of the same thing.

A boy pours a jar of marinara sauce into the pot for spaghetti and fairly defeats the purpose of using the pressure pot. The same thing can be done with a regular pot at the same speed. Nothing is sped up. Nothing about the pressure pot is an advantage over non pressure pots except that it shut off itself. But he doesn't know anything else. Prepared tomato sauce comes from a jar. And so it goes for nearly everything else across videos one after another.

John Kohler's video on microgreens is the best thing I've seen for getting at why American population is so fat and unhealthy while also so incredibly health-conscious. He does take a long time to explain but he's also always extremely thorough.