Love the article, LizBeth! Thanks!

Thank you, LizBeth, for the heads up toward that Backwoods Home article. I love it. Just my kind of thing ;o)

Yikes. Bite into that bagel and you might just be eating barber-shop sweepings. Or Chinese pigs. Doesn't sound kosher to me!

Little surprises like that lurk everywhere. You won't find the following chemical in bread, but check out some yogurts, juices, or candies. Look for a common ingredient variously described as carmine, carminic acid, cochineal, or just the anonymous E120. It's a red dye, designed to pretty up the color of some things we eat.

It's also the abdomens and eggs of female beetles, boiled, dried in the open air, then crushed. Bon appetit!

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Furthermore, there's evidence that fructose actually makes us more hungry. So we consume HFCS, then we crave more food—and of course, the foods we eat load us with even more fructose. And there you have it—obesity, sugar highs, and unbalanced processes in the liver, pancreas, and other organs.

.....
It is so very like government to spot an artifically induced problem and "solve" it by ordering an artificial "solution"—which, at most, acts as a Band-Aid upon the original "wound" of bad nutrition.

But then, saying, "Maybe we should eat whole, minimally processed foods" would just be too simple, wouldn't it? Can't build bureaucracies or federal give-away programs around that, can you? And we can't be without our junk foods and our gunk foods, can we? Not even if it kills us. So we render crap food artificially "healthy." Yeah.

When we go into our kitchens to begin mixing up simple, basic loaves of homemade bread, we turn our backs on Authority and much that it has wrought. We reject—consciously or not—the belief that we must trust other people to predetermine what goes into our bodies. It's a form—and an important one—of owning our own lives. "Take your pig bristles and your boiled beetles," we say, "and shove ‘em."

It's a long journey from Wonder Bread (or whatever the junk food of our choice) to homemade whole grain foods. In part, it's a journey back in time. But it's not an act of foolish nostalgia for "good old days" that never were. It's also a journey forward—from having our diets directed by others for their own convenience to choosing our own better, healthier, more independent lives.

The entire article is good...these were just my favorite parts ;o) The article says it all, quite nicely.