Buckets for the Cure

Not fucking kidding. This is in line with a series of fictional, hopelessly misdirected/evil charitable organizations friends and I came up with, such as Dumpsters for Africa, which would send American dumpsters to impoverished African countries so that people there would be able to root through them and get something to eat and Wells for Children, which would be addressing the problem of overpopulation.

Anyway, Buckets for the Cure. It's real. It involves you buying a bucket (does anyone even think about the fact that the packaging of your "food" is a bucket?) of greasy fried death hormone torture chicken at Kentucky Fried Chicken, and them giving fifty cents to the Susan G. Komen foundation that does things with breast cancer, which isn't the leading cause of death among women in America, the leading cancer among women in America or the most deadly cancer among women in America. However, it does seem to be the only disease among women in America that deserves much interest, as evinced by pink everything. Breast cancer has been commodified to no end, and I cannot imagine how much money that foundation has made for corporations (like Proctor and Gamble, with their fucking pink Swiffer - does cancer stick to it?Who knows how many diseases that company has given people with its toxic everything.). Maybe some corporate megaboard controls it.

Fifty cent donation. Wow. WOW, Kentucky Fried Chicken (which is really owned by Yum! Brands, which is really owned by Pepsi), WOW. You are so giving. Wow.

Anyway, yeah, so it's offensive to the senses, but also offensive to any idea of health, in a very simple way: eating this shit will help you get breast cancer, as well as many other diseases. It will make your breast cancer worse. An anti-breast cancer foundation is telling you to go eat it, explicitly. Perhaps not as explicitly, they are telling you to eat as much of it as you can afford/stomach, so they can get money "for breast cancer." What ABOUT breast cancer? "Research."

Here is the result of a little bit of research I've done: stop eating garbage. It helps out with many ills. I promise.

They are encouraging you to eat some of the unhealthiest food available. To fund them. To help fix you. When you get sick from eating it. Insane. And bankrupt.

If anyone cares enough, why don't you just send money to the foundation itself? Probably cause you are fat, lazy and love an excuse to eat more trash. Pepsi is gonna make extra millions off of your stupid, thoughtless, gullible fat ass. They're the real charity.

A peculiar relationship to food

I was sitting in the food science building at school the other day and noticed a display on the wall entitled "Role of Nutraceuticals in Cancer Treatment." There was a picture of some broccoli and another picture of carrots, along with explanations of how nutraceuticals, or extractives of food, combat cancer.

Nutraceuticals. In other words, food? Reterming food as a drug? Rethinking food as a drug? This struck me as very odd.

What's so odd? Well, if people taking "nutraceuticals" had eaten these things in reasonable quantities in the first place, it would have been "food" and they would have been much less likely to develop cancer. Instead, many people in the western world eat copious amounts of things that are not really food. Sure, you can eat them, but they provide no nutrition to your body and often have adverse affects, like raising blood pressure, cholesterol, clogging your arteries, giving you diabetes, making you obese, giving you heart disease, cancer, so on and so forth. You CAN eat a lot of things, but that doesn't make them food. People have eaten bikes and I don't even know what else. Little kids will eat their own shit if you let them.

Our concepts of food, I think, are often defined by those who produce and market food. If it's on a shelf, in a package, then it's fair game. If someone will sell it to us, then it's food. They wouldn't knowingly sell us things that are so bad, right? People will decline to eat things based on taste, but seldom out of some objection to its quality, or whether or not it counts as food. Realistically, much of the food available to us is ridden with bug spray, which they've somehow convinced us is safe to eat, and of course ingredients that make us sick, slowly poisoning us, especially high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oil, and monosodium glutamate. We consume dairy products and flesh rife with hormones, antibiotics and literal disease - see any outbreak of e coli or salmonella.

And that's normal. Those are our diets. That's what we're sold, so that's what we buy. That's what we grew up eating, so that's what we keep eating. No one wants to think that we were raised on shit. No one wants to think that our parents fed us poison. Understandably, we do not want to believe that the society around us, of which we are a part, and especially those in control of it, is so perverse and ignominious.

So nutraceuticals, yeah. Food. You ate shit and didn't take care of yourself, and you have cancer or diabetes. Now you want the benefits of those "healthy foods," but you don't really want to eat them or change your diet all that much. Besides, it couldn't have been related to your diet. It just happens.

It's complicated to parse out responsibility for this mess. In the end, the overarching blame rests with the food industry, no doubt. The proliferation of shit food is absolutely a case of supply creating demand. Were people ever clamoring for twinkies? No. People made these foods in labs, packed them with artificial flavors, colors and scents, and made sure to incorporate ingredients that have physically addictive properties, particularly the sweeteners they use. Sugar is certainly addictive on its own, but much more so when distilled into more potent forms, such as white sugar and the worst, high fructose corn syrup. Then these foods were unleashed on the public and here we are, fat, sick and dying.

Still, we need to take responsibility for ourselves, you know? We need to take a good look at what we eat and what it does to us. We need to listen to our bodies. Getting in tune with your body is so important - what makes you feel good, what you should eat, what your body does not want you to eat. We've all been raised to ignore our bodies and take what we want, trying to fix the problems we make with drugs. Our bodies know best.