The Danger of Unprocessed Food

Today, my commitment to unprocessed, natural foods almost caused me serious harm. How? I nearly got hit by a car on my bicycle commute home from work! Why? Because I was so pissed off I wasn't paying attention. 

Moments before the end of my shift my manager pulled me and by coworker Jess aside to tell us that he had received an extra 1200 bucks from another site's HIV program. This got me momentarily excited as all the possibilities for the meal program flashed by in my imagination. I had visions of daily green smoothies, a weekly supply of eggs, a reserve of various whole grains to replace the bread and margarine we are trying to phase out, or at the very least caseloads of organic butter to replace that deadly margarine! 

But this excitement was very short lived. My manager decided to sink that money into caseloads of Ensure meal replacements since he only had an afternoon to figure it out before the long weekend (and the end of the fiscal year when all "surplus" money has to be spent so as not to piss off our funders). 

I am absolutely appalled and heartbroken. Ensure is one of the worst things we could serve our clients, particularly those with HIV whom this extra cash is meant to assist. These "meal replacement" drinks are ubiquitous in the DTES as they are routinely given out by agencies, doctors, and welfare workers here to those most sick and malnourished. Ensure interestingly has high resale value on the street, most likely because when one is sick and/or high it is hard to stomach much of anything at all and perhaps since Ensure is handed out by "experts," it is actually thought of as beneficial to dwindling health. Everyone needs a bit of ideology to feel better, even more so when your head is in the gutter. But in my opinion, these drinks are worse than a band aid solution, they actually make existing issues worse. 

1. Ensure is filled with chemicals, toxic substances and just a few synthetic nutrients, all of which push already weakened bodies to work even harder to try to assimilate the harmful substances that make up the drink's ingredient list. The combination of sugar, corn syrup, soy oil, corn oil, soy lecithin (these are just the first of over 40 unpronounceable) hardly constitutes a therapeutic substance. We may as well hand out  a few vitamins along with a bottle of coke!

2. As long as professionals hand out this crap nothing will get meaningfully better. Ensure is perhaps cheaper than a whole food alternative (and I would argue that this isn't necessarily the case) and more convenient (are we really that uncreative and lazy?), but these benefits far out weight the cost, and our justifications (i.e it's better than nothing--not true) only contribute to the false impression that at least something is being done. In the case of my agency it's even more blasphemous since we had some money (unadulterated by the industry discounts or stipulations that most likely also fuel Ensure's strong presence in the DTES) to spend on an alternative and there are people (me and jess!) who would take the time to maximize that 1200 dollars and create something healthful that would actually address our clients' nutritional needs.  

So yeah I am really pissed.