Food Fuckery Frustration To Go
So, I bought some of the new Lipton Ice Tea To Go packetts the other night in two different flavous, the Apple Cranberry and the Lemon something or other (it doesn’t matter). I cracked open three of the apple cranberry packs to pour in a jug of water and drank one cup of it. It’s yummy in an artifical way, but still good nonetheless.
However yummy it tastes, I take exception to the addition of sulphites to all of the Lipton Ice Tea To Go products on the market right now. Why are they there? How can Lipton justify this? Guess what - it’s not just this new product that features sulphites, either. I went looking for tea bags and the boxes all list sulphites on them. Why, I will never know. It’s not like these products will go bad the second you crack a box or tear into a box of individual crystals packettes.
There is no need for them in any of their products that I can see or understand. Lipton’s competition doesn’t do this as far as I could tell based on what was on the same shelves. Do you know what adding sulphite needlessly to tea means to the people like me who are looking for low calorie drinks that are advertised (as featured on the Lipton site) as being rated the second healthiest beverage right after water by doctors? It means my body goes into attack mode.
I have all kinds of weird blotches on my legs now. I look like I was standing to close to someone using a large roller to paint a wall blood red. My legs look like they have paint splatter all over them. And my ankles are swollen from the edema. This is a bitch to get rid of. Edema appears when the kidneys have been messed with. I can’t afford to have my kidneys messed with. I need them to be in perfect working order! This is precisely the kind of food fuckery we don’t need in North America but is allowed to go on daily. Sulphites are being using in everything now. It has to stop! This upsets me to no end, people!
It’s not like I can just take Benadryl and hope for the best because, while it’s a great product for those with allergies, it hasn’t been proven effective on sulphite reactions. And, really, who wants to be knocked unconscious for 12+ hours only to wake up the same intolerance reactions all over them? Not me. Taking heavy drugs like Benadryl is a waste of my time when all I’m guaranteed is a 50/50 chance of the reactions going away rapidly. I’ll put it to you bluntly: sulphites have no business being in teas in the first place!
What Lipton should be made aware of is the fact that sulphite reactions are different in every person. For me, it could quite easily enough been an asthma attack instead of my legs being attacked. What if it was a severe asthma attack, where my throat closes up? Do you know what I typically do when that happens? I run to make a hot tea to open up the airway and ensure it remains open from the heat and the tea properties. Oh, the irony!!!
*deep breaths*
Yeah, so… those of you out there like me… buyer beware. Although sulphites do appear on the ingredients label, I didn’t think to look before I bought the Teas To Go. I mean, who but Lipton would put sulphites in tea products?!?!
And for those of you from Lipton reading this, shove your products. I will never buy them again, nor will I be recommending them. You use food production practices I don’t agree with, therefore I never willingly buy your products again. None of them. I don’t care how many nutritionists you have stuffed up your asses… er, I mean, backing your paid studies, you will never convince me you have anything but inferior products to sell.
P.S.: This post will remain on this blog for as long as I own this domain. Lipton’s will have to sue me to force me to take it down. I want everyone in the free world to know about their food fuckery practices.
Higher Anxiety Learning
As someone who has, for the better part of her working career, found herself working random jobs in a few college settings, I have to say that with each new school shooting - and especially the one from Montreal where the shooter was running around the cafeteria - I, along with my co-workers, have had to find a way to deal with not only shock and grief, but escalating fears and anxiety because it’s not just those whacky Americans shooting themselves up, we’re starting to do it, too.
Also with each new school shooting ramapage, we must find a way to calm not only our own nerves, but those of the students who look to the staff in various parts of the campus for guidence, protection and reassurance that the chances of something like that happening here are next to nil. Well, with each new school shooting rampage, that becomes harder and harder to do. I couldn’t look the students in the eye the other day and tell them everything was going to be just fine, and to go back to living their lives like it never happened or like we are somehow untouchable because we are passive-aggressive Canadians, and we have gun control laws, dammit!
Truth is, we are all sitting ducks in that school. Everyone of us. Every single day. You would have to be made of stone to deny that fact or dismiss it. You would have to be made of stone to shrug it off and pretend it can’t and won’t happen to you because stuff like that only happens in the States or Montreal or Vancouver. Truth is, we have tonnes of international students there who are so lonely, isolated, alone and depressed about being here so far away from home that we should all be worried about their mental state. And a gross amount of these students are here to study arts as they apply to new media and video gaming.
About to shit your pants now? You should be.
I like to smile and joke around at work, but I just know one day something I say won’t be taken the right way or with the lighthearted intention it was meant to have. That’s always in the back of my mind because half of our staff speaks another language first and English second, and even we have trouble communicating clearly on the best of days.
I don’t want to talk specifically about each shooting par se, or even this last one in detail, but I do want to wonder out loud about how it is the media in any small town USA can live with themselves after cutting back resources so much they can’t afford to have local coverage of big stories that imapct the whole country like this, and then turn around and blame those on the ground making very tough decisions with very limited information who put themselves in danger to save others?
Where is the local coverage in those four rich, deep radio selections?
How is it that the very students these men and women were on the ground desperately helping to save could turn around and tell the media they couldn’t hear the gunfire over their iPods but still expected others to inform them of critical moves needed to keep their sorry asses alive. I wonder, how in the bloody hell were cops and university staff supposed to warn these kids even if the kids cut their hearing off? They tuned reality out a long time ago, so this day shouldn’t be any different, no? They should be held accountable for not keeping their own eyes and ears open, no? Why is it always someone else’s job to keep them alive and safe? They are in university, for gawd sake? Grow up! Live your life without your parents holding your hand at the big, bad university! And take responsibility for tuning out reality when your attention to detail was required but not given!
(I just know I’m going to get shit on for this post, but I don’t care. I really don’t.)