Things I Love About The South

These are mostly food. Because if you have ever had Southern food, you know that it is to die for.

I'm already trying to gain a natural-sounding accent. I'm retreating so far into my roots I might as well be running backwards.

• Grits, every morning if I want. Yes. :)
• Barbecue, like the real stuff.
• Hush puppies.
• Caribou Coffee
  
• GoodBerry's Frozen Yogurt, and the cute, scruffy employee
• It's green all over here :)
• The bugs make silly noises
• Most of my extended family is an hour and a half away, maximum
• The Accents. Need I say more?
• Humidity. I like it, ok? I'm weird.
• The general Southernness.

If you've no idea what the South is like, I recommend you either get your butt down here, or at the very least do some research via books and movies. Although I will have to warn you that in Southern movies, someone usually dies. Fried Green Tomatoes is my current favorite.

Unresolved Issues With the Animal Kingdom: The Monsanto Link

Every once in a while, I get an additional glimpse into the world of evil that is the deer. Their plans are not always clear to me, and rarely do they give themselves away, but sometimes, I get some insight.

Last week, my mom, sister and I packed up our belongings and drove across the entire country. Yes. The whole thing. Well, all but Nevada and California, but I feel we've driven that stretch enough times that it counts. Back to the story.

Everything was going swimmingly until we got to the end of Nebraska. Iowa, it turns out, was full of construction, detours, and closed roads. So we spent several days winding our way down rather pleasant country highways through Iowa cornfields and soybean patches. All this pleasant country life seems, well, pleasant from the outside. But I know better. And not in the crazy Deer-and-pigeons-are-evil way that many of my friends frown upon. No, in the well-researched, people-who-are-not-me-believe-this-also-because-it-is-a-fact way. (Not that deer and pigeons aren't evil.) You see, the life of the American farmer kind of sucks because our government favors corporations over the individual, and corporations, as it happens, can be really evil. Don't believe me? Watch Food Inc., stop eating for a week, cry, wail at the injustice, get hungry and try to grow your own food, then return to this blog. Done? Good. Now, back to my Iowa story.

There's a particularly evil corporation, Monsanto, that is doing it's best to monopolize soybeans. As Food Inc. will tell you, there is either corn or soybeans in pretty much everything Americans eat these days. Monsanto copyrighted a gene.Why is that even legal??? Ugh. Anyway. Their soybean crops have to be treated specially- farmers cannot reseed their fields with their own crop-they have to return it to Monsanto and buy new seed. It's expensive and wasteful, and frankly, I think it's wrong. But can you get soybeans without this Monsanto gene?Yes, yes you can. It's difficult, and many have tried. But there's this little snag-if ANY of your beans have the gene, you're out of luck. It's just like having all Monsanto genes.

By this point, you're probably wondering what on earth this has to do with deer, and why I went off on such a tangent. On the Iowa/Missouri border early last Sunday morning, I saw two deer in a soybean field. Eating the crop. You know what that means? They have soybean poop. My brain started working and I realized with a jolt the deer are inadvertently helping Monsanto spread their evil. If a deer eats a Monsanto bean, then goes over to a non-Monsanto field and takes a nice Monsanto-laden crap, Farmer Joe's Pure Unadulterated Field is suddenly tainted by Monsanto impurities and indiscretions. Joe's life is ruined, all thanks to Bambi & Co.

I hate deer. I really do.

Anemia, The Crying Baby

This past fall was a rough time for me. I’m not going to go into details, but I was having a lot of problems in my family and personal life. There was, however, an event I was looking forward to: donating blood. I had been trying for several months to gain enough weight to be able to donate. My friends were plotting to force-feed me cheeseburgers until I outweighed them. I did not have to resort to that, but I really wanted to be able to donate when the blood people came to my school in October, so it was definitely a conscious effort. I figured I was healthy and therefore ought to do what I could to help those who were less healthy. I was wrong.

I’m not a fan of needles, so I wasn’t surprised when I started to feel faint even before they stuck me. The last thing I heard as I lost consciousness was “Oh, she’s a spurter!” I came to quickly only to fill a unit in 4 minutes, which is about 3 minutes too fast. I fainted again when they pulled the needle out, but as I sat on the floor in the corner munching cookies and slurping juice, I figured it was just the needles. For the second time, I was wrong.

For the next three weeks, I had horrible, skull-splitting headaches, every day, without fail. Due to various issues, as previously mentioned, my planned doctor visits were pushed back until fate decided I really needed to see someone. During church the Sunday of the fourth week of headaches, a woman fainted in the middle of the service. Unfortunately, I am a sympathy fainter. Luckily there are a number of doctors and nurses at my church, so while the woman who fainted initially had to be taken out on a stretcher by the ambulance drivers, much to her protest, I was simply given water and made to sit down for the rest of the day. The next morning I found myself in the doctor’s office, being diagnosed with anemia and being scolded for donating my blood when I couldn’t produce enough blood cells for myself, let alone donate any. I’d lost almost 10 pounds, which was more than I had gained in the first place.

I have an iron deficiency-caused anemia. My doctor said the solution was to eat a lot of protein to balance out the gratuitous amount of exercise I naturally encounter on a daily basis. This works, to a point. I gained the weight back, my cheeks no longer look like paper, and the headaches stopped, but every month is two steps forward, one step back. If you know what I mean…

How is this a food issue? Well, it drastically changed my diet. I had been eating what I thought was a balanced and healthy diet, fruits, vegetables, grains, light meats like poultry, occasional red meat, lots of beans and rice, and of course, obscene amounts of junk food. I now eat beef jerky, protein bars, nuts, and eggs in addition to many of those other foods; the ratios just shifted. Here’s the catch: if I stop eating these foods, my anemia rears its ugly head, and punches the inside of my brain. So when I had to have FES surgery and lost a lot of blood, slept for four days without eating much more than yogurt and a burrito, I got the headaches again.

What have I learned from this? The medical people are like vampires: they suck your blood and leave you anemic. Anemia is like a screaming baby in your head, only the screams are silent, and the only thing that shuts that baby up is a nice, juicy hamburger. Looks like my friends were right all along.

Food Issues: Nasty Fruit Chunks

Yogurt is exceedingly difficult to buy. There are so many choices, and so many ways you can end up with something disgusting instead of something wonderful. This issue is compounded with a universal inability for yogurt manufacturers to properly label their yogurt.

I have a problem with the hunks of fruit so commonly found floating in innocent yogurt. It’s not even really fruit by the time it makes it into the little plastic cup. Instead, it’s the hollow, tasteless pulp of what used to be a delicious strawberry. There is no flavor to those leathery excuses for food- it’s all been squeezed out into the yogurt already. Nobody wants it anymore. It’s gross. If I wanted pieces of fruit in my yogurt, I would put them there myself, using fresh fruit, pure fruit, unadulterated by a food processor.

Usually avoiding these nasty fruit chunks is easy, like when the yogurt people put the words “Fruit on the bottom!” on the outside, as though it’s something to be proud of. There are also those horrible, sneaky, good-for-nothing yogurt manufacturers who write NOTHING on the outside which indicates the level of nasty, leaving the poor consumer in the dark about whether or not their pina colada is chunky and full of hairy coconut bits. But they are not the worst offenders. Oh no. The worst are those yogurts which claim to be “whipped” or “smooth” which seem to imply that they are, well, not lumpy, but when you open the yogurt, there sit those poor, lifeless fruit droppings you’ve come to detest.

I’m telling you, yogurt buying is a dangerous mission. You best watch your back, and know your brands.