All the bad advice confused me for a long time. A person gets a food version of learned helplessness, but we keep giving up, since any of these tactics are too miserable for a lifelong commitment.

But eating healthy is a lot more work, too. I won't touch the meat at one local supermarket -- it's so low quality I don't even want to look at it. Their produce section is where they put their attention. I'm fortunate that there are three other choices in a fifteen minute radius. And I'm not stuck with the hour drive to some giant megastore.

I had to stop eating chicken as a staple because as it got cheaper, it got worse. Now, it's got no taste to me. And spicing up something my body rejects is part of how we got ourselves into this.

That's not a big deal, in that I have access to ground pork and beef, which I prefer anyway. It's that I worry they keep trying to "corporatize" our food when it's hard enough to get when it's good.

At the same time they were urging us to eat Five a Day, which was a marketing project, they downgraded the produce. Cut costs there, to pay for the advertising, no doubt. I can't consistently get good fruit, I'm deeply skeptical about salad greens that wilt so I can't use them the second day, and so I buy from the local organic store, which stocks local stuff, and we don't eat much produce, comparatively. Mr WB loves apples, which are grown locally, and by some miracle, my store brand unsweetened applesauce tastes like apples. It must be made from fresh apples, since it will be stored as sauce.

I also use fine jams to flavor my smoothies. Because it's difficult to get good peaches, for instance. I buy seedless raspberry because most of the oxalate is in the seeds. It's the only way to get real flavor, consistently. A tablespoon is hedonistic, sometimes I use less, and about the carbs I'd get in the same flavor, from fruit. And cheaper.

Both cooked, both "processed," and yet it is consistently good, so must be made from fresh, with the same ingredients my grandmother used. This is the kind of thing corporate food wants to confuse us about.

Look at all the effort I put into these distinctions. And I'm glad, because I feel better and better all the time. It's not rice and beans and medical expenses.

Food as medicine is the best of both worlds.