Nutritional Wisdom

What exactly do I mean by nutritional wisdom? I think humans used to know what foods to eat to stay healthy or cure ourselves, as there wasn’t a pharmacy selling over-the-counter drugs on every corner nor a doctor to see 24/7. We use to eat what was seasonally available. During the winter months we harvested celeriac root, kohlrabi, rutabaga, ate many kinds of squash, & pumpkins. Now we stare at those vegetables in the grocery store and wonder, “What the hell, do you do with that?!” If you’re like my family you might even buy some and try your best to prepare a dish that your family will actually like and eat. These items, however, aren’t a part of our dietary repertoire. Long ago during the spring we’d gorge ourselves on fresh strawberries, spring lettece, sweet green peas and other foods that only grew in the tender sunlight of spring. Those days are long gone. We eat strawberries and other foods whenever we like. We’ve genetically modified our fruits and vegetables and created hybrids, which ship well, but have the nutritional value of the cardboard box they were shipped in. The same has happened to flour. We once ground the flour, as we needed it. Now we eat flour milled months before which lost most of it’s nutritional value 72 hours after it was processed. Then our food wasn’t interesting enough so food manufacturers in their wisdom started adding colorants, flavorants, and preservatives. Is it any wonder why Americans (in general) are some of the sickest in the world? South African grocery stores are also full of highly processed foods, but they don’t consume the vast quantities of fast food that Americans do. I’ve been told the baboons that engage in “urban foraging” have decaying teeth. I fear their consumption of human food has affected them in worse ways and perhaps is “rotting” away their sense of nutritional wisdom. I’m doing my best so the baboons that live here preserve their sense of nutritional wisdom and I pine for the days when humans still possessed it.