Food You Can Trust

It’s a damn shame what’s happening to food in America. But the bigger shame is the people funneling in and out of the grocery stores, like cattle, lining up to get their steroid shots not knowing the true cost of their quick treat and promise of dinner. Not even the so-called “healthy” food choices are safe anymore, most of them chalked full of mono- and diglycerides, phosphoric acid, potassium sorbate, and on and on and on, all to extend shelf life and cut down on productions costs to satiate the corporate greed that has consumed this country. 

Politicians get on the TV and tout being for the people, but they’re only for the people who are dull and docile, poisoned into complacency by the food they dump into the troughs they call our grocery stores. And people eat it up. They love it. Standing in line to throw their garbage onto the checkout counter. And no matter how many times you tell them the dangers of what they’re putting in their body, they don’t listen, and you get silenced.

“Stop listing the ingredients of Doritos every time someone checks out, Micheal.”

“No one wants to know about the hazards of emulsifiers, Micheal.”

“You can’t tell people the president is poisoning them, Micheal.”

“You can’t call people mindless cows, Micheal.”

It used to be that if you ate around the edges of the grocery store—produce, meat and dairy sections only—you were eating relatively well, but that’s not even safe anymore, with bioengineered produce and meat pumped so full of steroids and antibiotics that chicken breasts now look like the pectorals of the Incredible Hulk. 

Nothing can be trusted, because, the fact of the matter is, you don’t know what they’re doing to your food. And there’s no way for you to monitor it. Lord knows they’ll never let you see what’s going on behind the doors of those factories and processing plants, either demanding credentials or claiming that they don’t do individual tours or it’s not open to the public.

Bullshit.

They just don’t want you to uncover the lies, because then the jig will be up. They’ll no longer have a nation of mindless sheep, obediently bleating their salutes. 

Occasionally I’ll have people come through my checkout line, with their purchases indicating they might be on the edge of an unveiling, buying all the ingredients for bread instead of just a loaf, placing all organic fruits and vegetables on the counter, unloading raw nuts instead of the almonds with sprayed on flavors, but then, inevitably, the last thing they pull out of their cart is something like dino-chicken nuggets, or they hand me a candy bar to ring up at the last second. I’m here starving and forcing myself to choke down potatoes just to stay alive, and they’re willy-nilly shoveling shit into their faces without a single qualm.

Disgusting. All of them.

All of them, except her. 

At first glance, I thought she was going to be one of those fake, new-age hippies, with her dreads and wooden beads and blousy dress that displayed her braless tits, smelling of lemon and sage essentials oils. I hate that brand of idiot, who comes in with their canvas totes and buys only food in packaging that markets one-hundred-precents-recyclable. They think that they’re so good for being so concerned about the planet, without once thinking about how they’re buying their food in its recyclable packaging from the same companies that make Doritos and Reese’s Puffs and don’t give a shit about you or the planet.

She put two things on the counter: six organic bananas and a brand of granola I’d never seen before, which, after six years of working at that store, didn’t happen to me very often.  I flipped over the bag after scanning it to read the ingredients, and she blushed. “I normally make my own,” she said, “but I’m going to babysit my niece and nephew, and I don’t really have the time.”

I only half-heard her, too fixated on the ingredient list. It had six items: oats, flax seed, chia seeds, almonds, pure organic honey and organic coconut oil. “This is actually really good.” I flipped the bag around to display it for her, as if I was about to give her sales pitch, as if she didn’t already know the excellence of her choice. 

She beamed. “Oh, I know, right? I love how they use coconut oil, because it doesn’t become carcinogenic when it reaches a certain heating point.” All I could do was blink at her, enraptured, and she blushed again, adding, “Most oils become carcinogenic when you heat them.” 

It was like finding a unicorn. I couldn’t speak. I didn’t know what even to say. It’d been so long since I found anyone of this caliber, or who even had the potential to be of this caliber, which, to be honest, I was still entertaining doubts. Because you didn’t really know anyone for sure until you delve deeper in. 

But she had potential no doubt, which is why I abandoned my register at the last second to run after her in the parking lot. “Hey, hey,” I hollered from a distance, so as not to startle her too badly.

“Hey…” she said.

I slowed to a jog as I approached her car. “I’d love to learn more about those oils.” 

She smiled, and we exchanged numbers, and two days later, I pulled my car alongside the curb in front of her house. It was just as I’d expected—rampant plants created a jungle in her front yard and various gardening tools and soil were scattered on her front proch. Inside, the living room wasn’t even a living room, but rather a pottery station. When I gawked, she explained the chemicals that went into something as basic as making eatery on a commercial level. This woman was truly enlightened, and throughout the night she proved more and more that she had figured out how to subvert the governments intentions. She had figured out how to live. She even taught me a few things, as she explained why she hung eucalyptus around the ceilings throughout her home, saying that the air was the seldom thought of poison, with all the pollutants and chemicals being pumped into the air. Something deep in my gut twitched as I stared at her talking, and my mouth watered as I watched the curvature of her body, climbing up and down from a stool, and the way her ass silhouetted under her dress as she turned to take a fresh bundle of eucalyptus from me. I longed to sink my teeth into that ass, those hips, those legs, so perfectly maintained and cared for.

“The unfortunate part about it all,” she said, walking me to my car, “Is that it’s impossible to guarantee that you won’t be ingesting any poisons. But I also take cleansing measure to make sure my body effectively expels them all.” 

“Like a juice cleanse?” I asked, leaning my back against the car, looking her up and down in the moonlight. 

She raised a finger and booped my nose. “Exactly like a cleanse. I drink Burdock root tea every night to flush out the day-to-day toxins, and once a month I do an herbal cleanse to get anything nasty.”

I rubbed my hand along her hips, squishing and squeezing gently, as I pulled her into me. “And when’s you next cleanse?”

“In two weeks.” She threw her arms over my shoulders.

I slid my hand along the arch of her neck. “I’d love to do it with you.”

“Okay,” she whispered, as she raised on her tiptoes and brushed her lips against mine. 

We spent the next two weeks together, or as much as we could with my work schedule. She was an herbalist, so clients and patients would casually drift in and out of her door with varying ailments throughout the day, but the nights were ours, as she taught me tinctures and exotic herbs, and our lips explored different parts of each other. I knew she wanted to fuck, but it felt wrong to me, like I would be defiling something so pure. 

“Well, stop saying fuck,” she said one night, lying naked beside me. “We’d be making love.”

But that only made the feeling worse. I felt terrible enough as it was for what we were doing. Like it was a sin. Some sort of sacrilege. 

She was a vegan, and I understood and supported her choice. And she kept me well food, but there was a perpetual hunger that permeated my body, like my very cells were crying out for sustenance. I knew this hunger well, but it had grown to a full body ache, because I knew the potential of being satiated. Each bite I took of quinoa and beans was a tease to my soul, like it should be filling but wasn’t. 

She truly is a different breed, I thought to myself, as she worked through a plate of carrots. I couldn’t understand how she sustained herself like this for so long. But then again, I thought, cows and rabbits do it. 

By day two of the cleanse, I thought she must be superhuman, raving about how light and energetic she felt, while it was all I could do to roll out of bed in the morning. And by day five, I got sent home from work for passing out at the register. “This is your first cleanse,” she said, draping a warm towel across my forehead. “Your body isn’t used to it.” She explained how your body wants to always maintain homeostasis, and if it’s used to toxins, it thinks that’s homeostasis. “You have to retrain it for a new homeostasis” was the last thing I heard before drifting out of consciousness.

The next morning, she was sitting beside me on the bed, holding two glasses of the ghastly green concoction, one in each hand. “It’s the last day of the cleanse,” she sang. “How do you feel?”

I rolled up onto my butt, swinging my legs onto the ground. “Actually, I feel great.” And I did, knowing that I was nearing the end of all this nonsense. We clinked our glasses together in a cheers.

Now all I had left to do was wait for her final shit. She called me into the bathroom, radiating pride, to show me what the ideal excrement should look like. She explained the color and consistency in great detail, gesticulating down at the toilet bowl, as I wrapped my arms around her from behind, snaking my hands over her breasts, feeling her nipples perk, as I found my way up to her neck and squeezed. 

She slowly came back to consciousness in the kitchen, as I sat at the table eating, watching her eyes go through confusion, realization and finally settling on panic. She flailed underneath the restraints, her bare breasts jumping back and forth with each thrash, as she screamed through the gag jammed in her mouth. 

I put my fork down and went to her, patting her gently on the head before crouching down to eye level. “I’m sorry,” I told her, brushing a strand of hair away from her face. “I don’t normally do this until after I’ve killed you, but I was so weak, and I still wanted to explain. So you understand.”

She realized her nakedness, scanning over her body, her eyes stopping at the filet taken out of her thigh, her chest hiccupping with her ragged, quick breaths. 

“You have to understand,” I rubbed her cheek with the backs of my fingers. “You can’t really know what’s going on with your food unless you monitor it the whole time. People are always trying to sneak in some cheap shit. Some poisons. You should understand that. I know you understand that.”

Her head rolled back, as the sobs began.

“And it’s been so long. I’ve been starving for so long. You coming into the store was like I god sent.” I slid my hand behind her head and pulled it up for her to look at me. “You’re the perfect specimen of health. And I’ve been waiting to find something as pure and healthy as you. You can’t trust any of the meat they put in the stores anymore, but I know I can trust you. And I just wanted you to know that. I just wanted to you to know…you’ve done well. And you’re going to do well for me.”

She shook her head back and forth.

But I only nodded in return. I couldn’t have asked for more. I couldn’t have asked for better.