Free Radical Trivia And Other Such Nonsense

As we approach the 250th birthday of the United States, we find the less united than ever and more like untied than anything I can imagine. The drunks are still getting soused, the dopers are still finding ways to get out of their heads and most ordinary citizens are living splendidly in their personal cocoons of self indulgent apprehension, selfishness, bitching and moaning about everything, satisfied with nothing, with their ordinary objectives (The next meal, the next drink, the next person to take to bed with them and a warm place to shit) — and insanity replaces sanity at every turn and either nobody really cares or they are all in such a stupor that they could care less.

I go to the grocery store and look down at packages of bacon in the meat department… packages that once showed a weight of one pound on the label in the packaging that now shows some ridiculous figure such as 14 ounces. The price tag, of course, used to be Seventy-Nine Cents and is now somehow evolved into Four Dollars and Nineteen cents. And I do not know for certain but I am suspecting that some of the bacon I am looking at is not bacon at all but is a product made by pressing ground up random meat scraps under enormous pressures, and being shaped in the form of a sliced bacon strip and which has had some smoke flavoring added in the manufacturing process.

While I am strolling down the aisles of my handy-dandy grocery store with “Low Low Prices on almost everything….Low Low Prices that seem, somehow to be getting higher and higher every time I enter the store, I wonder how much, if any, extra water or pink slime has been added to my ground beef purchase for no other reason than to make the product weigh more so that I am paying a lot of money for meat trash than I am for actual ground beef that comes from God only knows where because the packaging doesn’t tell me where the meat came from, how old it really is, and a lot of other things that a normal person would need to insure they are purchasing something that is actually good for them and their loved ones or something that is a hazard to health in the long term.

I read somewhere or the other, just this week, that those lovely, perfectly-shaped, perfectly baked orange and cranberry muffins actually do not have one iota of real fruit in them but instead, have some small pieces of something has been created and dyed and flavored to resemble the real thing. I have purchased a store-bought pizza from the freezer section of a super market where the label contained the entire list of ingredients and not a single ingredient that I could find on the label was anything but combinations of a bunch of things with excessively long chemical-sounding names.. no mention of flour or of pepperoni or anything else… just a long list of ingredients that I have never heard of before: I dubbed this purchase “The first Entirely Chemical Pizza” that I ever purchased …. strangely enough it did actually taste somewhat like I thought a pizza should taste. Never bought another one though. Never will buy another one either.

I read another nightmarish article somewhere claiming that sometimes even that delicious-looking piece of New York Strip Sirloin steak in the meat department packaged meat case is nothing more or less than a lot of un-named meat scraps from any number of cattle from a lot of unknown sources that have been processed, infused with liquid, made into a meat paste, shaped and formed under intense pressure to look and feel like a legitimate steak, to weigh like a real steak and to cost like a real steak.

I have learned one shopping trick that has saved me some money however….I have learned to carry a small digital scale with me to the grocery stores. When I find a package of meat I would love to own, I look at the weight on the label on the meat package and then I weigh it myself on my own scale to see what the difference, if any, might be. Sometimes I have seen a meat packaged marked with a weight of 2 pounds come out a whole ounce or two short when weighed on my personal scale riding along in my shopping cart. When this happens, I take it to the customer service department and get my well-deserved price adjustment. They don’t always like it, but they always do it for me anyway. I guess they are not interested in receiving a visit from the local weights, measures inspection people…. or something….and I am assuming without knowing that some of these outfits actually depend on the customer never cross checking package weights.

Now I am not naming any retailers in this blog post because I am not interested in being sued….and I am not telling you that these things happen in every store I visit because they do not …and I am not claiming that everything I have talked about here has been experienced personally be myself…because not all of them have been …but some of this is stuff that I have experienced and some of it is stuff that I have read about but cannot confirm or deny…. the idea is that every shopper should always be aware of the possibilities and never allow themselves to completely trust everything they see or hear.