HOW THINGS HAVE CHANGED!
I shamelessly stole this from another group. It left me shaking my head...
Once upon a time our moms would cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife, but nobody got food poisoning.
Back in BC -- when the air was clean and sex was dirty -- Grandma would defrost hamburger meat on the counter and you'd sometimes nibble it raw, but who ever heard of E. coli? Or e-mail or eBay or e-file or e-tickets. Except for Old MacDonald's "ee-i-ee-i-oh," that was about it for e's.
And we didn't shrink in terror from salt, sugar, flour, butter, whole milk, beef and mercury-laden tuna, fat-laden salmon or pesticide-raised chicken. We ate fatty pastrami and inhaled those no-no nitrates in bacon. Our only worry was quantity. If we were hungry, we ate. Period.
School sandwiches were the newly illegal, calorie-laden, diabetic-induced, carbohydrate-forbidden peanut-butter-and-jelly jobs on -- excuse the expression -- white bread. And nobody prepared them wearing latex gloves. And we sloshed them down with chocolate milk, which today's food police place on a sliding scale 2 points below strychnine. A meal like that today and you'd be arrested.
And how were these killer tasties transported? In wax paper from a brown paper bag, not in sanitized, pasteurized, homogenized, lobotomized icepack coolers. And with them were those now-dreaded, verboten, crappy doughnuts, cookies, Oreos and Twinkies. The ones that today are forced to come with the calorie, potassium, sodium, riboflavin, vitamin B and dextrose count on the package.
And guess what? We were all thinner.
What an archaic health system we had then! Who knew we couldn't ingest whey or dairy was bad for us? Almost nobody had a therapist, a psychiatrist, a group-therapy session, an anger-management class or a personal trainer or a specialist in right lung and left thumb and upper liver and lower intestine. And where was the Benadryl and antihistamine and sterilization kit and emergency first-aid kit and doctor's shot when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed.
And you know what? Not a single person I knew was told they came from a dysfunctional family.
Kids played on vacant construction sites, and if we skinned a knee, it was a 50 cent bottle of Mercurochrome. It wasn't followed by a 10-day dose of antibiotics followed by your health-plan insurance provider followed by a forever wait in the ER until they determined who was your HMO followed by a call to the attorney to sue the contractor for his untended, vicious, horrible, life-threatening, danger-to-life-and-limb pile of gravel.
How did we survive without PlayStation, Nintendo, Xbox, Wii, tweeting, texting, IMing or 270 cable stations?
We went to and from school safely without cellphones. Airbags were what you called those boring uncles who never shut up at the Thanksgiving table. The "environment" was a word you had to memorize, not something you had to save. And sustainable energy was what was needed after two sessions of phys ed, not some compact fluorescent light that's green and saves the planet
Once upon a time our moms would cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife, but nobody got food poisoning.
Back in BC -- when the air was clean and sex was dirty -- Grandma would defrost hamburger meat on the counter and you'd sometimes nibble it raw, but who ever heard of E. coli? Or e-mail or eBay or e-file or e-tickets. Except for Old MacDonald's "ee-i-ee-i-oh," that was about it for e's.
And we didn't shrink in terror from salt, sugar, flour, butter, whole milk, beef and mercury-laden tuna, fat-laden salmon or pesticide-raised chicken. We ate fatty pastrami and inhaled those no-no nitrates in bacon. Our only worry was quantity. If we were hungry, we ate. Period.
School sandwiches were the newly illegal, calorie-laden, diabetic-induced, carbohydrate-forbidden peanut-butter-and-jelly jobs on -- excuse the expression -- white bread. And nobody prepared them wearing latex gloves. And we sloshed them down with chocolate milk, which today's food police place on a sliding scale 2 points below strychnine. A meal like that today and you'd be arrested.
And how were these killer tasties transported? In wax paper from a brown paper bag, not in sanitized, pasteurized, homogenized, lobotomized icepack coolers. And with them were those now-dreaded, verboten, crappy doughnuts, cookies, Oreos and Twinkies. The ones that today are forced to come with the calorie, potassium, sodium, riboflavin, vitamin B and dextrose count on the package.
And guess what? We were all thinner.
What an archaic health system we had then! Who knew we couldn't ingest whey or dairy was bad for us? Almost nobody had a therapist, a psychiatrist, a group-therapy session, an anger-management class or a personal trainer or a specialist in right lung and left thumb and upper liver and lower intestine. And where was the Benadryl and antihistamine and sterilization kit and emergency first-aid kit and doctor's shot when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed.
And you know what? Not a single person I knew was told they came from a dysfunctional family.
Kids played on vacant construction sites, and if we skinned a knee, it was a 50 cent bottle of Mercurochrome. It wasn't followed by a 10-day dose of antibiotics followed by your health-plan insurance provider followed by a forever wait in the ER until they determined who was your HMO followed by a call to the attorney to sue the contractor for his untended, vicious, horrible, life-threatening, danger-to-life-and-limb pile of gravel.
How did we survive without PlayStation, Nintendo, Xbox, Wii, tweeting, texting, IMing or 270 cable stations?
We went to and from school safely without cellphones. Airbags were what you called those boring uncles who never shut up at the Thanksgiving table. The "environment" was a word you had to memorize, not something you had to save. And sustainable energy was what was needed after two sessions of phys ed, not some compact fluorescent light that's green and saves the planet
