Sometimes I think back to when I was younger. My parents pretty much raised me on the standard american diet (which btw abbreviates to SAD and in case you can't tell I'm a total holistic health nut). You know gmo, high fructose corn syrup sweetened toast and hydrogenated peanut butter for breakfast with a side of growth hormone milk from tortured cow. The same processed bread with the same peanut butter and jelly made out of mostly hf corn syrup for lunch with a piece of fruit covered in pesticides for lunch. Frozen vegetables with pan fried factory meat in canola oil (okay I don't exactly know how to cook meat I went vegetarian when I was 14 but you get the idea) for dinner.
It makes me shudder a little bit when I think of what my parents used to feed me. I remember the summer before I was vegetarian, my dad brought home KFC because I used to like it. I remembered what I read online about how KFC raises their chickens and instead of bringing that up to him, I told him I wasn't really hungry at the time and he said well okay come up and get some food whenever and I retreated to my room and cried a lot over it because here my father's idea of taking care of me and treating me was something that had endured an unbelievable amount of suffering before its life was cut very short and it was cut into pieces and shipped out. That memory has been really poignant for me and I honestly still get really upset when I think of it.
I have a few other memories like that which don't stick out quite as much. Like the summer before I moved out, whenever I saw my mom eating something frozen for dinner because she was too tired from a long day of work to make herself something decent, I got really upset. Idk because I feel like not taking the time to properly feed your body as a habit indicates a lot of sadness. Maybe that's taking it a bit too far, but to me, feeding myself is my ultimate expression of love for myself. So idk I just kind of saw my mom as being sad and tired, and I felt that she was going to be very lonely once I moved out. She's not a very social person; she mainly just prefers the company of those close to her.
I had very much appropriately come to terms with those things, but the memories themselves still made me sad and I couldn't figure out why. Then, idk why this didn't come to me sooner since it's really fucking obvious, but I realized that. As an interdependent, (mostly) grown up person, I've been able to detox from all of the shit that my parents fed me over the years and maintain a steady healthy diet and all that. But they're still eating the same SAD stuff. And I'm afraid that if they don't start taking better care of themselves, their bodies will wear down way sooner than they need to. They can live a lot longer than they probably will if they don't change the way they're eating. I love my parents; they've worked hard to make sure that I would grow up to be successful and I just want them to be around for a long time so that they can be proud of all of my successes. I hope that I can encourage them to eat better.
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