Only On The Walters Post

You know, I’ve been thinking about grocery stores lately. Don’t know exactly why, but I was standing there the other day in front of the milk cooler and it just hit me. You know that feeling when something you’ve walked past a hundred times suddenly strikes you a bit different?

There it was, a whole lineup of milk, 1%, 2%, skim, lactose-free, and then a couple jugs of plain whole milk hiding at the end, like some guilty pleasure. Funny how the regular thing became the odd one out.

At any rate, I picked up the skim milk, looked at the price and found it cost more than the whole milk. To me that seemed a bit backwards. The thing is… skim milk is whole milk with the fat taken out, then they add things back in… stabilizers, sometimes sugar to make up for the flavor that left with the fat. What most don’t know is that the fat carries vitamins and balances what nature put there for a reason. Strip it out and somehow that’s supposed to be healthier.

Once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere. I also picked up bread that stays fresh for three weeks. My grandmother’s bread went stale within two or three days because it was just flour, water, salt, and yeast. Somewhere along the way, we got convinced that natural isn’t enough.

Our grandparents drank whole milk, cooked with butter, and ate what was local. They worked hard and didn’t need labels to tell them what was good.

Anyways, maybe it’s time we stop letting marketing tell us what’s better. Makes you wonder what we’ve gained from all this improvement… and what we’ve already lost without noticing.

Until the next time: Keep Your Minds Open & Your Stories Alive. GW