bananas – Observations and Misunderstandings

To be a happy and healthy human being in this world we seem to need to combine a rather large variety of things. This combination too varies from person to person and while there are probably a few fundamentals like food, shelter and company, to be both happy and healthy may require a little more than the basic versions of these things. Perhaps being able to attach a noun modifier like good would help and add a little further clarity. We could attempt to include the idea of various possessions like a mobile phone, car or warm jacket, but it’s not worth going down that avenue as it’s validity would be questionable at best. So we stick to the three fundamentals above. There are more I imagine but right now these are the first that come to mind. Perhaps you could throw liberty in there too but unless it’s severely restricted it would probably be something we could adapt to without much fuss.

Shelter seems like an obvious one but there is a difference between a fifteenth floor inner city apartment and a countryside estate. There will be the same extreme ends of the spectrum for company too from friends and lovers to flatmates we have to endure. It is the issue of food that I want to focus on though. I definitely see happiness in food, I associate it with love and one of my favourite things is sitting around a table eating and drinking with friends and family. The happy then is covered but the healthy is were I’m a little confused. There are the obvious things like making sure you eat vegetables and wholegrains, as much organic as possible and to stay away from processed anything when you can. I have a varied level of success on all three of those but I still don’t always feel healthy. I suspect part of that is down to how healthy my gut microbiome is and I’m working on that to the point where I think I can sense and feel improvement specifically because of it. The other is whether I get my recommended daily allowance (RDA) of the required vitamins and minerals. I was looking into how to get enough magnesium yesterday and discovered that perhaps it’s not as easy to achieve this mythical RDA as previously thought. Unlike child poverty figures, it’s not possible to simply change the definition to achieve the desired outcome. Our bodies need what they need and this RDA seems to already be the minimum.

One avocado then provides 15%, a cup of lentils 30%, a two hundred gram fillet of salmon contains 15%, two bananas 20% and half a cup of cooked spinach the final 20%. That’s not impossible to imagine eating in a day but these are also some of the more magnesium heavy foods so the rest of the weeks diet would need to be of a similarly high standard. It is for this reason we must attach good to food. If you would struggle to fund such a diet, which in itself is reasonably common, then there’s a good chance you’re going to struggle to stay healthy and considering that a lack of magnesium can affect our energy and mental health, probably happy too. It seems life is complex. A good life at least. But that’s nothing a new pair of trainers can’t fix.

Go on, admit it, who panicked back there for a little? Buy too much toilet roll did you? How about all those bags of porridge oats you heard were nutritious and would last a long time? What on earth are you going to do with all those tins of kidney beans, you don’t even like kidney beans. How did that baking bread mission go, bored of the effort yet? It’s great being able to take the moral high ground and call people out for being pricks.

I saw something online earlier that some councillor in Derby had posted showing bins full of food people had dumped because they had bought too much and it had good bad. Loaves of bread, chicken, vegetables, that type of thing. There was what appeared to be a carefully placed bunch of bananas at the top of one pile though yet the bananas looked fresh, not a speck of aged brown on them, eerily similar to the standard I bought earlier today actually. The skeptical monster in me went into overdrive, my bullshitometre when wild with excitement as I realised the whole thing stunk of set up. The game given away by someone trying just too hard to make the food waste look unjustifiable. I don’t care what you say, nobody throws away a fresh bunch of bananas.

I must confess that in all the panic I did buy two things in bulk, three actually if you count that I now have two kilos of peanut butter and one of cashew nut butter. I must stress though that I eat that stuff normally, and found it strange that in all the panic with empty shelves everywhere, there were loads of tubs of inexpensive pure peanut butters which are a great source of protein and fats. How many times, you can’t live off toilet roll and tinned tomatoes. Actually four things if you count the three tins of sardines I bought thinking it was mackerel, three tins which might find themselves donated to a food bank it’s worth adding.

I bought about three months supply of multivitamins, vitamin c and probiotics just incase it does all go tits up and I’m living on stale bread and water for a bit, also to keep me healthy with virus’ going around of course. I bought thirty kilograms of dog food for my little darling too. People didn’t seem to mention pets in all of this chaos but what happens if the food supply dries up and we run out of pet food, do we start giving them people food when we’re hungry ourselves? Well to avoid that conundrum I now have a back up of three to four months worth of food for her. I may not have rushed out for myself but at least my dog won’t go hungry. It’s amazing the lengths we’ll go to when we find someone or something to love.

But the madness seems to have calmed. The shelves are full and now people only look suspiciously at each other looking for signs of potential illness. I saw a great moment in the queue for the check out though when a woman reminded the couple behind her that they should be keeping a distance of two metres. The man just suggested she simply move forward to create it oblivious to the fact that she would then be less than the two metres from whoever was in front of her. People are a constant source of entertainment. I bet she got about two days worth of excitement from retelling that story.

Tag: bananas

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