When you cook for a Crow, if you ever have to do it, you will quickly realize, as I have, that a staggering percentage of food in the human world is hardly qualified to be called food at all. In fact it is utter crap. Junk food is really a terrible term, and I think it was probably invented by the junk food industry to convince consumers, yes, it is junk, but hey, it's food! It's junk-food! And it isn't. It's just junk.
So much "food" is jammed full of sweeteners, salts, and other chemical additives. At least in America, and especially in California you have a choice between Cheetos and all natural corn chips made from corn, zero transfat high oleic oils, and a bit of sea salt. Here in Japan, most people have no idea what a transfat is, and almost all food is imported which means, it gets off the boat, and sold directly to unscrupulous food producers who turn it into 100 different stretched, fluffed, puffed, powdered, flavored varieties of sugared, salted, preserved, coated, processed bleh. Not one of them turns it into natural healthy snack food. There really is not a culture of "healthy" snack foods. Yes, Japanese home cooking is mostly fish, and rice, and vegetables, but in the snack and cereal world, you just don't have a strong healthy snack food awareness, education, R&D, demand or supply. If you buys snacks, it's pretty much gonna be junkfood.
It's hard to find even simple oatmeal that is not prepackaged with additives. Buying simple grains and legumes is expensive, too expensive. There simply is not the dirt cheap, Mexican migrant labor pool, or the extremely industrialized, centralized massive aggro biz of America here, so foods we take totally for granted in the U.S. are much more rare, and expensive here. Imagine walking into a large grocery store, and you cannot find "a" bag of cornchips, never mind an aisle of bags of corn chips in every conceivable variety. You can't imagine that. To get plain, natural corn chips, I have to go on an hours drive to CostCo, and then I have a choice of one kind of so-so corn chip, which is too salty. I'm not complaining, I am just trying to illustrate, that when you are feeding a Crow, just like when you are feeding a baby, you suddenly realize that the whole world of food is shit. The difference is, for some bizarre reason, we let our kids eat shit. We let shit slowly creep into their diets. We say, huh, it didn't kill them. They even ask for more. We keep buying it. But birds can't survive on it as a daily habit. I met a guy at the park here feeding popcorn to park Pigeons. Not real popcorn, snack pop corn. Birds should not be ingesting that level of salt, and hydrogenated oil. They'll have heart attacks. The thing is, humans shouldn't either. We don't complain nearly enough. And people in Japan, as far as I can tell, never complain at all about anything to anyone; that's not true, but it almost is. It makes feeding kids, and Crows a tricky task for a concerned parent.
So much "food" is jammed full of sweeteners, salts, and other chemical additives. At least in America, and especially in California you have a choice between Cheetos and all natural corn chips made from corn, zero transfat high oleic oils, and a bit of sea salt. Here in Japan, most people have no idea what a transfat is, and almost all food is imported which means, it gets off the boat, and sold directly to unscrupulous food producers who turn it into 100 different stretched, fluffed, puffed, powdered, flavored varieties of sugared, salted, preserved, coated, processed bleh. Not one of them turns it into natural healthy snack food. There really is not a culture of "healthy" snack foods. Yes, Japanese home cooking is mostly fish, and rice, and vegetables, but in the snack and cereal world, you just don't have a strong healthy snack food awareness, education, R&D, demand or supply. If you buys snacks, it's pretty much gonna be junkfood.
It's hard to find even simple oatmeal that is not prepackaged with additives. Buying simple grains and legumes is expensive, too expensive. There simply is not the dirt cheap, Mexican migrant labor pool, or the extremely industrialized, centralized massive aggro biz of America here, so foods we take totally for granted in the U.S. are much more rare, and expensive here. Imagine walking into a large grocery store, and you cannot find "a" bag of cornchips, never mind an aisle of bags of corn chips in every conceivable variety. You can't imagine that. To get plain, natural corn chips, I have to go on an hours drive to CostCo, and then I have a choice of one kind of so-so corn chip, which is too salty. I'm not complaining, I am just trying to illustrate, that when you are feeding a Crow, just like when you are feeding a baby, you suddenly realize that the whole world of food is shit. The difference is, for some bizarre reason, we let our kids eat shit. We let shit slowly creep into their diets. We say, huh, it didn't kill them. They even ask for more. We keep buying it. But birds can't survive on it as a daily habit. I met a guy at the park here feeding popcorn to park Pigeons. Not real popcorn, snack pop corn. Birds should not be ingesting that level of salt, and hydrogenated oil. They'll have heart attacks. The thing is, humans shouldn't either. We don't complain nearly enough. And people in Japan, as far as I can tell, never complain at all about anything to anyone; that's not true, but it almost is. It makes feeding kids, and Crows a tricky task for a concerned parent.
Nice post and thank you so much for share a good piece of content with us.
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