Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Brain Drippings

    Sitting in my robes as I write this post, savoring a warm cup of coffee, I can only think of the past few weeks of interaction with the rest of humanity. Is there something wrong with all of you, or am I just losing my grip on sanity? Well, I know I'm a little mad, but these days who isn't?

     Example, I was in the store last week (oh how I loathe the store) and I noticed a sign advertising "Gluten-free ham". Now, I like to think I'm an educated man, and I thought I knew what gluten free meant. But because I would lose the last vestiges of my mind, I asked one of the workers at the deli counter.
     "Oh, it doesn't have any gluten in it," he responded.
     After fighting my urge to maul another human being, I whipped out my handy-dandy smart phone my wife made me get and typed in "what the hell is gluten?" Just as I thought, Gluten is  "a type of protein found in foods processed from specific types of grain." Now forgive me for my ignorance, but how the hell would ham have gluten in it? It's meat. Sliced meat at that.
     Did they not feed the pig grains? Did they make certain not to process grains around the ham when it was becoming packaged food? Do they not use a wheat-based oil to preserve the ham? I found myself asking all these questions, and sadly nobody was able to answer them, because everyone who works at the gluten-free deli has not been briefed on what the hell they sell.
     Partially enraged at humanities stupidity, I walked down the bread aisle, to get my wheat bread. Full of glutens. And that's when I saw it.
     Gluten-free wheat bread.
     How the hell is that even possible? It's a wheat product with no wheat in it! I checked, the bag wasn't just an empty sack, it had actual bread in it. It looked just like my wheat bread. If you mixed these two up, you would not be able to tell the difference, unless gluten free bread tastes different, which it just has to or someone is lying to us.
     Now I may just be ignorant and not "in" on the latest health craze, but I am more than  a little concerned about a populace of people that, for thousands of years, lived on grains. And once our bodies evolved to put up with that, we've now decided grains are bad for us.
     How? How are they bad?
     You know whats bad for you? Fast Food. Smoking, Doing Crack. Glutens are not dangerous. Bread may make you put on some pounds, if you eat way too much and do zero exercise, but that's not because the bread is inherently bad for you.
     You know how I know? Go to Barnes and Nobles and pick up their book Philosophy in 30 seconds. Not only does it explain a philosopher and what they thought, it lists their age when they died. You look at guys like Plato, Homer and Emerson. The former two lived past eighty. The last one lived to 78! The first two didn't have antibiotics! Or toothpaste! They lived in a time when they thought the world was carved by a pantheon of Gods that would regularly come down and rape them. Emerson lived during a slightly better time when we had actual medical practices, but some of them were horrific. Mercury fillings anyone?
     My point is, these people ate gluten. It did not kill them. It did not even hinder them. They pushed gluten aside like you would a toddler (okay, like I would.) I've worked in kitchens before, real restaurants that you've all been to at one point. I was a baker, and I made the bread that you all greedily devoured. And it was fine on its own. But then the company had my glaze the bread with melted garlic butter, and fill it with cheese. And hand it out for free, in an unlimited supply.
     This is why people are afraid of glutens people, because we took it too far. We had our bread, and we were fine with it for a long time. But now it has to be stuffed with cheese or mayonnaise with extra salt and chocolate chips. We can't just have freaking bread anymore.
     You know what? All of you reading this, go for a walk. I don't care about you in any particular way as we don't really know each other, but just... go for a walk until your breathing hard. Then walk for ten more minutes. If one tenth of you follow this, I will have helped with the obesity problem in America be a fraction of a percent.
     Seriously, go for a walk. I'm going for a swim...
     Sweet Dreams 

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