Posted by
darrel on Tuesday, November 11, 2008 1:54:33 PM
Imagine you are walking down the aisle of your local supermarket, and are attracted to a package of food; let’s say a prepared meal in the frozen food section. The package has a picture of a delightful looking plate of food that is colorful and appetizing. You are unable to resist the packaging so you purchase the item for later consumption. After again looking at the package as you store it in your home freezer, you find yourself impatient for the next mealtime, knowing that it is for tonight’s supper, not for a snack for now.
As you wait in anticipation for the meal, you continue to think about how good that meal is going to taste and how good it is going to be for you. Your mouth is watering and you find it hard to wait. You also are liking the fact that the meal is already prepared for you and is going to take much less time than your former home prepared meals. This is the best of both worlds; great food and more time for yourself.
Finally, suppertime arrives and with it your pre processed meal. You take it out of the oven after following the cooking instructions and open the wrapper only to find that it doesn’t quite look as it did on the package, but close enough you assume. You pick up a fork full of the delightful looking food and put it into your mouth. It’s good, but not quite what you had expected. The portions are not quite as big as the picture portrayed either, so after finishing the meal you find that you are still hungry for something else.
After grabbing a late evening snack to stave off your hunger pains, you retire to bed hoping for a good night’s sleep. Within a couple of hours, however, you find yourself awake and needing a visit to the bathroom. Your stomach is causing you grief and you don’t know whether you should sit on the toilet or lean over it. You spend the rest of the night either lying in bed tossing and turning or at the john tossing up your guts. At first you thought it might have been that late evening snack, but you’ve eaten that same snack many times before with no ill effects. Then you considered that wonderful prepared meal from the grocer’s frozen food shelf.
Not feeling able to go to work, you make a call to your doctor’s office, pleading for an appointment to see him right away. When your doctor examines you, you are told that you had a serious case of food poisoning, and it is a wonder it hadn’t killed you. He gives you a prescription for some medication that will relieve the discomfort, and tells you that if not for the vomiting you had to endure through the night, you might have died.
When you get home you find the package that the food came in, and after reading the ingredient list, you discover that there are many ingredients in the food that in the past have caused you problems. You didn’t bother to look into the ingredients before you ate the food because the packaging was so convincing, and now you have had to pay the price through a more than uncomfortable night and an expensive doctor’s visit.
After doing a little further investigation of the product via the internet, you discover that, while the company that sells the product is in America, the product itself may have come from a foreign country that has some health and safety concerns.
You vow to never again trust that company and never to eat any of its products, but your food poisoning continues to plague you for some time.
Like the tainted food, we are destined to suffer the effects of our decision to buy our last president based on the attractive package, rather than for the ingredients that have made us sick in the past.
At least, that's my view