Healthy Eating.....

Yesterday, while Barb was counseling me on how us Old Farts need to act in order to survive in the 21st Century, she asked about my eating habits, because a lot of us solitary survivors of Flower Power and the early days of Banyen's Books & Sound, on West 4th Avenue in Vancouver, have evolved a very haphazard feeding routine. She wanted to know if I eat three meals a day. (No, I almost never do that. It's against my almost-religion!) And she asked if I ever cook anything substantial. (Yes! I actually do that!) And how often would that be? (Almost every evening, if I don't bring home something from the Deli Counter at Save-On-Foods.) ........So here's a little example of what I cook in the 1200-watt microwave. These hamburger patties and the fresh frozen spuds on that special microwave platter take about three minutes and forty seconds. I add a big glass of cold milk, or a cold cup of Ginger Ale, sometimes mixed 50-50 with Tropicana No Pulp Orange Juice, and there's supper. With sometimes a cereal bowl of ice cream, or bananas & milk & sugar, for dessert.

Now, I'm going to digress into a short rant about oldies & eating problems.  To wit, a lot of us suffer from fatigue caused by a variety of medical issues, and that is often compounded by a lack of appetite, partially related to our stomachs having shrunk a little with age and possible lack of interest. And then some of us have read that lighter eating in our old age tends, somewhat surprisingly, to prolong life. Perhaps because of its reduced demands on the digestive system.

But we do need nourishment, and Dr. B., my specialist, says "You should have some red meat about three times a week, because it contains iron of a kind that you can't get from vitamin pills. Synthetic iron in pill form doesn't have the same qualities for working with red blood cells which carry the oxygen around as does the real thing in your natural foods." I put that to the test, and he's right! There is a difference. And I could tell by how I feel after taking his advice and doing that for a while. Problem is, I don't like red meat of the kind sold these days. Compared to the undoctored variety of several decades back, this modern stuff tastes like shit. And if it looks like shit, and smells like shit, and tastes like shit, then it's probably shit ! And I can remember when you could buy a whole side of beef for the price of a couple of today's steaks. And you could enjoy eating the whole thing, if you stored it properly. (End of rant!)