OK, son, let’s talk about how much the world has progressed since I was your age. You hear a lot of parents whining about how they used to walk 10 miles in the snow to school, or how our televisions used to take up a third of the living room even though the screens were 6 inches wide. Fair enough. Honestly, though, that’s nothing compared to the issues with food. For example, did you know that ketchup used to only come in one color? Yup, just red. I know, right? If you were red/green color blind you didn’t know whether that was really ketchup you were putting on your hot dog or baby poop (Although, I suppose the results would be mostly the same).
You, my friend, have it easy. Did you know that your parents used to have to use our teeth when eating things? It’s true. We used to have to chew stuff just so it would fit down our throats. Now, of course, your fruit is already mashed, cut or dried–transformed into tiny, barely recognizable morsels pre-loaded into your cereal, yogurt and McDonald’s pies.
Corn was the worst; it used to be packaged in–get this–leaves! You’d have to peel away these leaves and the corn was stuck on this big stick called a “cob.” We used to have to scrape it off with our front teeth. You, on the other hand, get to pour it from its can directly onto your microwavable plate. I bet 50 people, 4 trucks and countless machines were involved in getting that corn from its primitive natural state to the sugar-soaked, leaf and cob-free, sterilized and canned, individual bite-sized, vitamin-deprived kernels you take for granted. I never had so many people and so much effort go into preparing my food for me, so don’t give me crap about how bad your life is.
Just to give you an idea about how much we’ve progressed from when I was a kid, I’ve supplied a simple example below. It will show you how much work has gone into making your life better. You’ll see, we used to be total primitive idiots who were forced to eat raw fruit within days of it being picked. Things are way better now.
When I was a kid, we used to have to eat the crap on the left.
Instead of the old-fashioned way in which fruit was picked and sent directly to market, your food is prepared this way:
Step 1: Pick a fruit that comes with a perfect 100% natural wrapper and, instead of shipping to the market, ship to a processing plant 1000 miles away.
Step 2: Peel away the perfect 100% natural wrapper–often referred to as “skin.”
Step 3: Pulverize the fruit until it’s mush.
Step 4: Super-heat the mush so it’s sterile since it no longer has the perfect 100% natural wrapper.
Step 5: Add cinnamon because super-heating the fruit made it taste like crap.
Step 6: Use a gallon of oil to make a new, non-degradable, non-recyclable plastic wrapper to replace the perfect 100% natural wrapper that was removed.
Step 7: Squirt the pulverized, super-heated, taste augmented mush into the plastic wrapper and cap with plastic.
Step 8: Spend the million dollars necessary on marketing experts in order to convince people that all that work actually created a better product than the original one with the perfect 100% natural wrapper.
Step 9: Put 24 of the newly packaged fruit into a cardboard tray, wrap the plastic packages in more plastic and heat-shrink it to hold the whole thing together.
Step 10: Load the plastic-wrapped packages of plastic encased fruit onto diesel trucks and drive thousands of miles.
Step 11: Unload, throw out the plastic and recycle the cardboard that hold the plastic encased fruit.
Step 12: Place the plastic encased, pulverized, super-heated, taste augmented mush on a shelf a few steps away from fruit encased in its original perfect 100% natural wrapper.
Step 13: Price the plastic encased, pulverized, super-heated, taste augmented mush at roughly six times what one would pay for the equivalent amount of perfectly packaged, raw, fresh fruit.
You’ve got to love progress. Next time you start to complain about how we grownups have messed up the world you’re inheriting maybe you’ll think of this and realize how much better we’ve made it for you.
I've become my parents 
Keeping Up With The Holsbys
July 10, 2012
Nice one. Take one great topic, add a pinch of sarcasm and it’s a recipe for a cracking blog.
This post is bang on!!!
Barmy Rootstock (IBMP)
July 10, 2012
Thanks! And BTW, I used 1/4 teaspoon of sarcasm. The secret is to add bright blue ketchup early in the post then let it fester– er, simmer.
c j tittle (@jonesbabie)
July 10, 2012
Laughed my head off at this one…and I have been a victim of the gimmicky packaging idea above. Grandkids can cause that kind of insanity. 😀
Barmy Rootstock (IBMP)
July 10, 2012
Oh, yeah, blame it on the grandkids who insist they just HAVE to have it or they might just die. Hey, if one kid has made me insane, multiple grandkids would send me positively loopy. You are forgiven.
jnsc4321
July 10, 2012
Yuck! LOL! Do people really buy the ‘modern’ day television hyped up, pre-packaged stuff? Guess my kids must hate me just a little, still buying it the old fashioned way…from the local farmer even! Maybe that is why my kids made it to adulthood/nearing adulthood without a single cavity?
Barmy Rootstock (IBMP)
July 10, 2012
I suppose somebody buys it. My son got that apple sauce in a kid’s pack when he was flying last week. Had the good sense not to eat it.
I can’t believe you would post in a public comment that you deprived your kids of the most basic of necessities and only fed them things you bought from some local grower. But, hey, who am I to judge?
Rayme Wells @ A Clean Surface
July 10, 2012
I worked lunch duty at a school and was puzzled by some of the “food”. I had one little girl raise her hand to tattle on a boy — he had called her cheese “fake cheese” and she felt that he was calling her lunch names and showed me the food to prove it wasn’t fake. I looked at the label details and sure enough, it was fake cheese; I explained that cheese is made out of milk, but sometimes they use oil instead of milk, so it isn’t really cheese, even though it looks like it is…she was still mad at the boy.
Barmy Rootstock (IBMP)
July 10, 2012
Haha! I don’t know what’s funnier, that she was upset that he was calling her lunch names or the fact that he was right!
EduDad
July 12, 2012
You write so funny it’s… like super funny. Seriously though, kids these days have it so easy there jaws are actually weak because the food is so processed they don’t really have to chew. Give em a raw carrot and they’d be physically exhausted from chewing (if they actually ate it.)
Barmy Rootstock (IBMP)
July 12, 2012
So true. When I was a kid our jaws were so fit we could chew through solid steel. My kid’s lucky if he can get through half-inch extruded aluminum.
Mimi
July 13, 2012
Okay don’t hate me! (Because by me saying that, now you won’t, right?)
I ate one of those over-processed mush sauces.
That’s not the worst part. (Besides the fact that I’m a grown woman eating squeezable applesauce.)
…I thought it was delicious, so I had another.
Now, I will never buy them, for all the wonderful reasons you stated. I just wanted to say, though, that there’s a reason kids these days act like crack addicts when they’re offered these things…the mush-making factory made it Kid Flavored, and infinitely more fun by ditching the old-fashioned spoon in flavor of just sucking it straight out of the package.
Barmy Rootstock (IBMP)
July 13, 2012
Oh, I never hate people that ask me not to hate them. It’s just common courtesy. But I reserve the right to hate everyone else.
So you had two of those things eh? Well you can always invoke the “do as I say not as I do” clause. And, for the record, I can’t remember the last time I took my own advice.
Mimi
July 13, 2012
*in favor