Kings and Queens

Take something good, and twist it into something bad. This is the technique used by evil to corrupt and lead astray. The scary thing is that us humans have been tricked into doing this to each other (although some demented people to this intentionally.)

I recently read an interesting article (http://health.msn.com/dietfitness/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100164969) about the food we eat. While it was not breaking news to me that the food I eat isn't all its cracked up to be, I was taken aback by how dire the situation really is. I was further angered by the fact that I have given into this mentality and system without much thought.

GOOD: We are made in the image of God and so we want to be like him. We want to be treated like Kings and Queens (or perhaps princes and princesses since God is the King) and there is nothing wrong with that. We DO deserve dignity and respect, honor and praise (if we follow The King that is)

TWIST: Since we all (or most of us anyway) have a desire to treated like royalty, we can be convinced that we should be served instead of having to serve. In this day and age we aren't bold enough to think that people should serve us (slavery prevents most of that), but we still want the benefits of servitude - service. It has been often masked as "convenience." (note: there is nothing inherently evil about service or convenience, but thay can be used for bad ends)

We are a society that seems to crave good service and high convenience. This is the link to the article I mentioned above (food in America these days). Like the kings of old, we don't want to have to grow, gather, and prepare our own food. We have more important things to do, like ruling a kingdom or watching American Idol (or whatever the latest TV fad is). We don't want to be bothered with manual labor - some of us have to do that at work which is bad enough, we don't want to have to do it at home as well. Some of us have white collar jobs and God forbid if we ever have to do very much manual labor during our lives. There is a general sentiment in America that we are such an advanced society, that there is no reason we should have to do manual labor.

It has been long known that people crave service and convenience. Marketers and advertisers have been exploiting this attribute ever since they existed. The key in America was to make the royal lifestyle accessible to the average person. With the laws as they are, the only way to make it achievable was to make it cheap enough for the average person to afford. Most people cannot afford to hire a housekeeper, a butler, and a cook. So instead we refined the mass production of goods so that nearly anyone could afford them - like bread, milk, butter, meat processing, and all the other things discussed in the article.

So why do we voluntarily put this bad food into our systems? Because it is easier than doing it the "old-fashioned" way. Who wants to roll out their own dough every day and pick peas from the pod (from the garden out back), spending the entire day cooking and cleaning, when they can run to the store and grab a loaf of bread and can of peas in ten minutes? It's a dangerous combination of time saving and labor saving. We would rather be doing what we want (whether that be lounging around or doing other work) than "stuck" in the kitchen preparing meals. Deep down we want to know that we are more than a cook, a housekeeper, a butler - we want to know that we are in charge of our own time and our own lives; we want to feel as if we are capable of much more than those things. (Part of the problem is that we never have respected and valued those manual labor jobs enough - they are looked down upon - and who wants to be looked down upon?)

So we save time and respect by buying our processed bread (pre-sliced for our convenience) and our canned foods, and we prepare dinner in less than 30 minutes so we can sit back and enjoy an episode of Lost. Ah, life in America is good. Too bad we're slowly killing ourselves with the food we eat. I think living a healthy balanced life is worth turning off the tube and spending a few hours preparing a meal and enjoying it with people who can appreciate the hard work and effort. It's either that or I'll have to find a job that makes enough money to afford a family cook.