The state of food..

I am recovering from esophageal cancer removal surgery, where I was reconstructed a little internally. There were problems with eating before the surgery, and I have got more problems now.

One of them is the quality of food available. It is next to impossible to reliably work it out from labels because the standard behind some of the terms is so vague and misleading.
Click here for an article written last year.

Ham and cold cuts in general..

Go into any grocery store and see if you can buy real unprocessed ham. You know that the pre-packed has been messed with a lot, but the stuff of the deli counter is just as bad. It is almost all re-constituted to look like the original, but the texture tells another story. The shape does too. Please point me in the direction of sandwich shaped pigs. No, there is no such thing, but there is such a thing as sandwich shaped ham.

Bread.. Getting decent bread is very difficult.

Some multi-grain bread has such a strong flavour that it overpowers anything eaten with it. The sandwich breads which are made the same shape as the sandwich pigs have an unpleasant flavour too, and I used to have problems getting them down way before I ever knew about esophageal cancer. Breads from smaller bakeries are often frozen in transit, losing quality for every kilometre travelled, and are not quite what one might expect from the labelling, eg French, Italian etc..

Frozen vegetables..

I have a suspicion that some are frozen for a lot longer than you might expect, but no manufacturer is ever going to admit that. The size of vegetable also suggests that many are picked way too early, and are probably grown in an environment that is far from natural. My journeys through countryside never reveal much by way of different crop types or animals too. Scary..

Does anybody care?

Yes, many of us do, but the food producers don't care. I have written to some about certain products, and they send me a $10 voucher. Big deal. I don't want a voucher that is only good for the crap that I am complaining about. I want a CEO, to whom I send a challenge to eat what the company produces, and tell me that it is ok and that they would allow their own families to eat the stuff.

The trouble is that the Canadian Federal Gov't can't, won't ensure that we, the great Canadian public, are covered, and as long as the laws are lax, the food producers will be too? Like any other business, they only do the minimum if they can get away with it.