It begins

Let me start off by saying, I’m sorry, but I am terrified of this project. That’s probably the only excuse I can think of—besides not being chosen for a service learning project—for starting Food Rules so late, but at least I’m being honest. Food is not what I do best. I hate grocery shopping—everything I buy either gathers frost in my freezer or rots on a forgotten shelf in my refrigerator. Or it enters a place that even I’m too scared to enter after dark—the pantry, where I suspect colonies of bugs migrate over my food while I’m sleeping, infecting everything and then vanishing in the morning.

Until this class, I’ve really almost beat food. I’ve never learned to cook and I tend to eat out a lot. Or on days when my wallet can’t afford that, my diet usually consists of unbuttered toast and protein shakes, or free food from work (it’s a Chinese restaurant). I should also note that I have a mild genetic digestive disease that inhibits my diet from things that would be great for this project, like rice and raw vegetables. To put it simply—they make my tummy hurt. In fact, most food does. On top of this, I’m just finicky with food. It’s not pickiness per se; I’m pretty decent when it comes to trying new foods. But my appetite tends to border being non-existent. I won’t be hungry for days at a time because of my stomach, or I’ll binge eat. I know, I know, I know. Not healthy at all. I’m working on it.

So to start this project, it took hours of fear. It took trepidation and actual terror and driving to Winn-Dixie with a sense of dread so encompassing, words fail. It took a full hour in the grocery store, bracketed by bored employees wondering why I kept writing ingredients down in a tiny notebook. And it took the courage to come home and stock my mostly empty refrigerator with my purchases. Before I did, I took a picture of what I bought. I placed the groceries next to a creepy doll just to express to you my horror:





Yeah.

I chose Winn-Dixie as my first grocery store to stock up on Food Rules supplies. It’s cheap to begin with and I can always use my grandmother’s phone number for a membership discount. The absolute terror for the assignment at hand turned into absolute confusion—I had no idea where to start. So I consulted the text—What should I eat, Michael Pollan?

Food. I began with things I thought might be mundane enough to pass the rules. PB&J seemed like a good place to start, but of course there was no worse of a first choice. Peanut butter has a surprisingly short list of ingredients, but sugar happens to usually be listed as good old number three. The list of ingredients on the jar of grape jelly is the food equivalent to that doll in the pictures: concord grape juice, high fructose corn syrup, fruit pectin, citric acid and sodium citrate. Even picking out a decent bread was a fiasco of ingredients. My question is why there is sunflower and/or soybean oil in just about everything I found in that store. How can an ingredient be and/or? I thought manufacturers would have a better grasp on their products.

The food items I did manage to get:

-white mountain bread
-tomatoes
-mozzarella cheese—one of the few cheeses I could find without coloring dye
-Vlasic Kosher Dill Baby Wholes—pickles, which have a stunning ingredient list of cucumbers, water, salt, and vinegar, although I expect some foul play with preservatives.
-Ronzoni Pasta—wheats, iron, and sadly it contains some folic acid, but I tried.
-Tony Chachere’s Original Creole Seasoning—salt, red pepper and other spices, garlic, silicon dioxide (to prevent caking).
-Winn-Dixie bowl-o’-fruit
-Iams Kitten Chow—not for me, but It hought it was crazy how much animal fat and by-product chicken meal was in this. The ingredients list was torturous to read through.
-My personal favorite: Honey. Ingredients: Honey. Do not feed to infants one year and younger.

So now that I’ve taken the first step towards food enlightenment, I’m staring at the items unsure of how I should feel. Each item—minus the tomatoes—is packaged so nicely, I feel embarrassed opening them, as if that’s violating them somehow. I would rather just look at them. I really don’t know where to begin, so for now I’m singling out each item and sending it a telepathic message “I am going to consume you. Even if it kills me.”