Corn

I've been rather upset with myself, as I have not resumed my fast. I have no desire to resume the fast. I give up, Jesus. You can fast for 40 days. I cannot. It appears that you are the chosen son, afterall.

Last night I came home from work and went through my Netflix cue. One of the ones I had in there was called, "King Corn." The description of the movie said it was the story of two just-graduated from college guys who learned that their generation was the first generation in our history who is not projected to outlive their parents. The reason: the way they eat - fast food, soda, etc. The guys tracked their eating, and then had a professor do a hair analyzation to see what it said about the biological composition of their bodies. The result came back: Corn. The guys found this interesting, and so decided to go to Iowa for a year to grow an acre of corn and to learn about its role in our food chain.

The results are a little disconcerting. The following couple of paragraphs contain spoilers about the movie, so you might not want to continue reading this until after you go watch the movie for yourself. And yes, I know it's a movie, and that I can't base my opinions off the opinions of a couple college kids. Problem is, those college kids talked with professors from different universities around the country, including Harvard; doctors, and people in the supply chain themselves.

For me, having grown up on a farm, it filled in a lot of blanks. It was as if I had this big section of the puzzle of my life that I couldn't get to fit, and their experience and research filled in the blanks. For example, the movie touches on the fact that the corn that grows in the fields that we see growing all over the country is unedible. I remember as a kid, we had some neighbors who didn't farm, they just owned a little house by a little creek, and they had a good-sized vegetable garden that they would plant to feed themselves. Included in their garden, they had a couple rows of sweet corn. I asked my dad if we could do like them and go get some corn from the field to eat. He laughed, and said, I know - you would think we could eat this corn. But we can't, it's not edible. He broke off an ear and let me try to bite into it. There was no biting in - it was rock hard and tasted awful. He said the corn we grow is not the same. The field corn we grow is grown to feed the cows and pigs that become our meat. Humans don't eat the corn we grow.

That didn't make sense to me. How can we produce fields and fields of stuff that we can't eat? How come there aren't fields and fields and fields of broccoli? Cauliflower? Carrots? For me, this "King Corn" movie came along and easily put the pieces in that were missing in my picture.

Corn.

As I've tried to do this latest fast, I've been realizing that there are certain foods that I am having an especially hard time letting go of. Corn is one of them.

I have eaten and consider a Raw Foods diet eating nirvana. I have eaten sugar in comparison. Raw foods made me feel clear, clean, calm, and in tune with my intuition and divine connection. Sugared foods create a feeling much like that of being drunk to me - foggy, sloppy, and blocked. I generally was pretty happy when I was drunk - and while sugar gives me that feeling for about 30 minutes to an hour, once it runs its course, I am left feeling angry and full of rage.

How this relate to the Corn movie:

In the movie, it showed them refining the corn to corn syrup. It showed how we feed cattle, pigs and chickens corn, and that becomes part of their biomass - and therefore ours. They showed the two guys who made the movie enjoying a typical meal of burgers, fries, and a soft drink ... and how the entire meal boiled down to one thing: corn. Even the fries, fried in probably corn oil. And even though they are still potatoes, they are a starch. Which boils down in our system to ... sugar.

I will be getting a bonus this month, and with it I am planning on buying a dehydrator, so I can prepare some healthy foods that I can take on the go. As I've been contemplating and looking forward to starting a self-made raw foods diet, I've been trying to figure out how I can do one food in particular: Corn Chips.

I have gotten over my love of potato chips. I don't crave chocolate chip cookies so much any more. Even brownies have lost their luster during this past year of experimenting with foods and their effects on my system.

And as I've started eating my beloved avocado and grapefruit salad, I've been scooping it up into me on a Frito's Scoop corn chip. I've been researching how to make raw corn chips. They can be made - just have to dehydrate them and they are now "healthy" instead of "unhealthy".

The movie last night made me realize that maybe there is a reason corn is not used that much in raw cooking.

It made me realize that maybe for me, I need to drop the corn for a while. I'm not interested in living a life of never eating corn again. But i do think my body probalby has enough of it for a while. I think things need to get balanced out in there.

So. There it is. It all goes back to the addiction, and it all makes sense. And it also made me realize that those days when I am ready to kill someone for a hamburger, french fries and soda, that I'm really craving my drug. That even that "protein" is not really protein. It's a disguised form of sugar.

Now that I have properly identified my adversary, I can appropriately fight him.

Overall, I am feeling so much better. I can deal with that. It has taken the last couple years to really pull apart and inspect my foods, to determine which are drugs and which are nourishment. But I feel it's paying off - even if the scale isn't saying so yet.

I have a recent blog about going to lunch with a co-worker, and how the "Drunken Noodles" did, in fact, make me feel drunk. Aside from that revelation, the good thing that happened during that lunch was that my co-worker ordered some crab rangoon. A former favorite dish of mine, the plate landed on the table, and he offered me some. And although I had fond memories of the creamy inside with the crispy outer shell, and the sweet sauce mixing with the salty rangoon - at that moment, all I saw was me having a slight asthmatic attack after consuming it. And I had no desire to experience that. I told my co-worker, oh, thank you. They look really good, but I really have bad allergic reaction to the dairy filling in them. He said, oh, yeah? OK. he said. And just like that, I chose my health. Slowly, oh so slowly, I am getting there. Thanks for listening. Until next time.