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Friday, March 07, 2008

Take one with Water.

Some days I manage to wriggle out of cooking even though I find it relaxing, because feeling obliged to prepare a healthy balanced meal every day is the pits. Many women are just too tired coping with a job and or children, and struggling with all the other essential household chores that can’t be left.

Healthy eating takes a big chunk of your time if you’re trying to use fresh vegetables and fruit rather than face the shame of being a freezer to microwave speed freak. Or maybe they simply can’t cook, although there’s no shame in that, especially now that schools don’t have regular basic cookery lessons for either girls or boys. Anyway, there is enough pre-prepared and pre-cooked food in a supermarket to tempt a saint.
Whose hand wouldn’t stray to a packet of sausage rolls rather than a cauliflower after a hard day at the office?
With hungry children waiting to be fed why shouldn’t you decide a quiche and a tub of pasta salad boasting no added colours or flavouring looks far superior to anything you could produce? Never mind that it’s chock full of preservatives to keep it looking so delicious.

Every day, there are programmes and articles about eating correctly, and television channels devoted to showing in graphic detail what happens to your insides and your outsides, if you eat nothing but processed foods. Bad skin, fatty livers, diseased toenails and worse are shown in all their glory. And then, the wafer slim presenter clad in disposable gloves that have just been prodding a particularly horrible liver, self righteously glares at us and says, ‘this is what happens if you don’t eat the right food!’ No wonder there are so many problems with comfort eating. It’s enough to drive the saint in the supermarket to chocolate éclairs.

We used to have a whole day every week in cookery class when I was at school. We took the raw ingredients in with us in the morning, and in the afternoon carried the cooked after effects proudly home for the family to sample.
My dad was very impressed with the loaf I made, and my Christmas cake was so good we ate it for tea when I got home, although I was supposed to take it back to school the following week to learn how to put marzipan and icing on it.
Sad to say, a lot of my efforts, especially if they’d had a long bus ride home on a freezing cold day, were pretty horrible.
By the time I opened our front door, already unhappy sponges had collapsed to the thickness of a dinner plate, casseroles were a discoloured lump in the bottom of the dish, and even Peg our border collie, who would eat anything and looked forward to my regular Thursday disasters, turned her nose up when I made pancakes.
On the other hand, over four years I finally grasped the general rules of what to do with a lump of raw meat, or a bag of flour and I haven’t poisoned anyone yet.

All those years ago, when the moon missions began and we watched open mouthed as Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, food that was nourishing but small in bulk, had been formulated for the astronauts.
Nowadays half a dozen men and women sit in space for weeks on end, so I assume the same principle of a little in and a little out still applies. That begs the question why after all these years haven’t the scientists moved on from whatever it was they did in the first place and taken another giant step for mankind and harassed housewives in particular, by finally shrinking a full meal down to tablet size thus earning our eternal gratitude?

Imagine walking into a chemist and seeing hundreds of bottles of pills with labels saying for example: Chicken Casserole. One to be taken with water four times a day. Just imagine the joy as you check out a wide selection boasting every taste under the sun for when you burp, in order not to forget the taste of food entirely? And right on eye level, a choice of once a day, low sugar, low fat, medium sugar, medium fat, or off the scale but who cares dessert pills, in pretty coloured bottles.

Junk food would be a thing of the past and we’d all be disgustingly healthy - unless you had an endless supply of cash and a trusted contact to provide you with illegal containers of McDonalds.
The biggest bonus would be loads more leisure time having waved goodbye, not only to cooking, but the washing up and the weekly trek to a supermarket. I can’t wait.

Sunday, March 02, 2008

Bummer!

As if it wasn't bad enough having to fork out for new glasses, the optician tells me I have cataracts! It'll be a year before he'll check them again which is a bummer, because it means reading and working on the computer will be getting a lot more difficult than it is now.
I'm not worried about having them removed; just thankful that these days they don't try to dislodge them with a sharp blow to the head as the Romans did.