Something I Can Do

The last thing I wanted was to be like everyone else. It seemed to me that everyone else was moving in one direction. It was a direction I didn’t want to go. It came from anger perhaps. The anger of losing my sweet baby to brain cancer in a world which holds no answer. Give money, give money. But still no answer. We are helping people, but I am not helped. Everybody I see is eating stuff which isn’t really food. Stuff which comes in wrappers and foils, boxes with pretty writing and fancy artwork. Little plastic cups with tasty stuff, but none of it food. Treats at the walk-a-thon, rallies and benefits, taste and smell good but don’t resemble food. Plastic water bottles, juice boxes and bottles and liquids in plastic. Plastic bottles piled high in cans, dirty, smelly. On garbage day, large cans lining the road on both sides, full of garbage. Everyone putting everything into their mouths. Nobody saying, “What is this?” Nobody questions. All the people saying, “Eat this way. This is what we do. We eat this at breakfast and this at lunch. We go to places where they feed us for dinner. We like it like this. You do this too. It is easy. It is fun.” All the people going to doctors and taking medicines. This is what we do. We all do this. Everybody has pain. The doctors say, this is what happens it is normal. The whole world is drinking and eating the same thing. I see pictures from other countries, they all have plastic soda pop bottles. They all have Coke. The food is in packages with pretty writing, boxes and bottles and tubes and tubs. Food is not in sacks and baskets. Everybody says they don’t feel well. Everybody is hurting somewhere and feeling afraid, but they keep on putting this stuff into their mouths. I don’t want to eat like that. I just can’t do it. I read and read. Every package and bottle, box and tub has words. Really small words. Sometimes the words are so small I need a magnifying glass. I read the words under the title ‘ingredients’. Our family stands in the grocery store and reads the words. We say, “What does this mean? How do you say this word?” We look for the food in the list. We don’t buy it because we don’t know what it is. The first time I went to the store and read the ingredient lists I came home with nothing. I cried. I went to the garden and put my hands in the dirt. We turned the earth and planted seeds. We weeded and waited. Meanwhile we bought fruits and vegetables fresh at the market and at the store. We bought organic, we bought local. We did not buy boxes or packages. We did not buy tubes and tubs. We put food into our cart. It didn’t look like much. We bought flour and yeast and baked bread at home. We rolled out our own tortillas. We made our own cookie dough. In the spring and summer we ate from our garden. Peas, lettuce, radishes, asparagus, onions, peppers, tomatoes, beans, potatoes, eggplant, cabbages, cucumbers, zucchini. We had too much food. We gave it away. We worked hard. It was fun and it was easy, it took time and it drew us together. I take my basket out to the garden and bring it back full. We feel well. We don’t go to the doctor. We don’t need a doctor because we are well. We don’t need medicine. We don’t eat what isn’t food. We aren’t like everyone else. We do different things. We don’t put garbage out on Thursday’s. We don’t have much garbage. We compost. Making food, growing it and storing it takes a lot of my time. Sometimes I am tired. Sometimes I don’t want to make my food. I think that it is a lot of work. It would be nice to eat what is already prepared. People think it will be OK but I studied the big foreign words on the ingredient lists. It is poison. It would not hurt you to eat a little poison one day in your life. But everyday, all day long, all the food that people eat is poisoned. Poisoned with artificial ingredients, colors, flavors, enhancers, conditioners, emulsifiers. It is all poison. It says ‘natural’ but it is still poison. People get sick and then they take medicine which is also poison. Their bodies get tired of fighting the poisons and begin to break down. Bit by bit people don’t feel well. Bodies which are deprived of nutrients and real food don’t have much to fight foreign germs with. Diseases begin to spread. Fear spreads too. The body is too weak and cancer begins to grow. The doctors say, “More poison is the answer.” The body becomes too weak and cannot heal without good nutrition. The doctors say, “Artificial vitamins will help.” The artificial vitamins contain more poison. My body is not artificial. It needs real food. My body is a part of nature. I need to eat from nature. I decide it is not easier to eat the way the rest of the world eats. It will be easier in the long run to provide my own food from nature, bake my own bread and roll my own tortillas. I decide that I have chosen a good path. I have chosen a healthy path. I am not angry anymore. There is something I can do. I can feed my family real food. I can grow herbs for healing. I can keep busy growing and storing and preparing good healthy food. I am thankful for the dirt and what it will grow for us. It is a good thing that I can give other people hope for a healthier life that isn’t expensive and doesn’t cost much more than effort. This is a lifestyle. I am beginning to notice that I am not alone. There are other people who eat real food from nature and prepare it themselves the way people did before there were packages. It is a good life.

Elizabeth Williams, writing exercise, 1,035 words.