35 year old Chicken Rice Anyone?

I had a realisation this morning when my mum asked, “Why did you buy sea salt; isn’t the salt I’ve been using, from the sea?”
That’s when I realised that we’ve slowly been going through a transformation in our diets, without realising it. And it’s a transformation from a nutritious diet to one that’s practically starving us from vitamins and minerals. What do I mean?

Take the Chicken Rice you ate for lunch. Is it the same chicken rice it was 35 years ago? “Of course not,” you’ll say. “I’ll get sick eating 35 year old chicken rice!”

That’s not what I mean. Does it contain the same amount of nutrients found in a plate of chicken rice 30 years ago? Sadly, it does not.

Rice 35 years ago was probably not processed. I remember helping my mum pick tiny weevil larvae and weevils themselves from uncooked rice, before she coked the rice. This does not happen today. You can be sure of this because nothing living is present in white rice nowadays.

Why? Because the rice has been processed!

Every nutrition bearing and life supporting rice germ has been removed form the rice so that it does not easily rot, increasing shelf-life and hence profits. As a result the rice today consists of very little nutrition and lots of high glycemic, diabetes causing starch. It is so devoid of any nutrition that even the weevil avoids it!

And the chicken?

It’s not the free range chicken that the chicken farmers use to rear 35 years ago. Those take at least 4 months to reach maturity. In that time the chicken would have built immunity against diseases, absorbed all the good nutrition from the grains and the worms it feeds on and had enough space to run around in to produce lean, healthy and nutritious meat.

The chicken we eat today, (yes the $2.50 ones) takes 21 days to grow to maturity. They’re fed processed foods packed with antibiotics to ward off diseases and other artificial additives to make them gain weight to look big and fat. They are kept in crammed conditions with hardly any freedom of movement. And all to increase the profits of, not the farmers, but of the large ‘franchisors’ who own these farms.

21 days is hardly enough time for the bird to absorb nutrients or build immunity against diseases. So when a disease strikes (which probably was caused by the low natural immunity of the birds, and the antibiotics becoming less and less effective against newer strains), whole farms are culled.

The cucumber’s probably genetically modified with an animal gene to confuse the bugs and weevils that would otherwise invade it. Hence even the cucumber may not really be a vegetable nowadays.

So you see how we’ve slowly been going thru a nutritional transformation without realising it? And we’re getting a bad deal from it; low nutritional value, genetically modified, antibiotic filled, high glycemic index…stuff.

It’s ironical really that at a time where food seems to be in abundance, we are actually starving ourselves from a lack of good nutritious food.