Yesterday, we "took" a lunch meeting with someone from out of town and, 'though I'd searched for local organic restaurants, the closest I could find (and had never tried) were about 40-60 minutes away on Los Angeles freeways. Not wanting to put our guest to the trouble, I settled for a local restaurant that served "okay" food.
Well, there we were, ordering. The idea of French fries to accompany baby-back ribs was nixed (trans-fats, among other things). The ribs themselves were sort of okay, if far less fresh than I am used to — if you're used to organic meats, nothing else comes close in tasting real, fresh and good.
A few hours later, I found myself feeling oddly yucky, kind of lugged down, and with a slight headache. I didn't feel sick, mind you, nor as if I'd gotten food poisoning. I just didn't feel my usual clear-headed, energetic and raring to go self.
That was yesterday. Today, I feel as if my liver is dumping something sour into my system, trying to get rid of it. Not exactly fun, and it's not exactly done, but my head is a little clearer. So that's it for me and conventional food; if I can't work, and can't enjoy my life, what good is it?
True story: when I told a friend that about the We Want Organic Food website — only to discover that he and his wife also eat organic — I observed that one can eat conventional food for years and not particularly feel the ill-effects, but after going organic for a while — wow, you can really tell. He verified that from his own experience and suggested that, if conventional food is all you eat and your body is chock full of them, it's not that one doesn't feel the effects of conventional foods but, rather, that you may be used to them.
I suspect that, as you cease ingesting foods with hormones, pesticides and other nasty ingredients, your body (having stored this type of thing over a period of time) processes them out and you feel increasingly better. But put more in and -bang!- you don't feel so great.
So, eating organically isn't all just about a wish to live in some kind of utopian bubble with unicorns aplenty. Nor is it about "health food freaks" (whatever that disparagement is supposed to imply; one supposes its purpose is to turn people away from healthy eating habits for reasons known only to the speaker). It's that they don't want to put food containing who knows what, prepared with who knows what, and raised who knows how, into their systems.
By the way, I also mentioned to my friend our difficulty in going to restaurants because we just don't feel that great after eating. His reply?
You don't know how many times we've been in the car, backing down the driveway, and think, "You know, we have some leftover beans in the refrigerator …"
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Janet W
Comment posted on 02/22/09 @ 1:04 pm
I went to a preliminary interview lunch and thought at first I wasn\'t going to eat anything. But I decided that might not be politic and ended up eating. I won\'t do that again. I had the same experience you did about not being sick, but definitely WILL NOT do that again.
Diane Vigil
Comment posted on 02/22/09 @ 1:11 pm
I know what you mean, Janet — and also about it not being politic to decline the food.
One of our little tricks is to bring along some acidophilus tablets. Just pop a few of those and the tummy troubles seem to melt away.