We’re surrounded by fake things. We get so used to fake, we hardly recognise real anymore. My recent trip to Hawaii has reminded me of how much around us is not real.

A walk down the cereal/breakfast food aisle in the supermarket is a wake up call. Rows and rows of “food items” which bear no resemblance to the food they once were. In one corner we found the American version of muesli, granola. In the whole aisle amoungst the tons of junk we found something which would be nutritious enough to bother buying. This is not just America, our breakfast food departments are almost as bad.

One item which caught my eye was “spray on cheese”, God knows what it actually is. It’s packed in a pressure pack can. You apparently spray it onto sandwiches, nachos or whatever you’re going to eat.

Science has advanced to a stage where Michael Jackson started out a poor black boy and is now a rich white man. Science has given us fake smiles, fake breasts, fake fingernails, and many more things that are no longer real. The construction industry has given us fake timber floors, fake rocks, fake brick.

What worries me is the food industry is focussing too heavily on “fake” products. Bread that bears no resemblance to the bread my grandparents ate. Maple syrup which doesn’t come from a maple tree.

Our grandparents ate real food. It came from farms, not from factories.

We can choose food from farms. It may not always be that easy, but we can do it if it means we live longer. If it means we stay healthy longer and don’t need to be fitted with an artificial heart, artifical hips or knees.

Human bodies were designed to be nourished with the nutrients digested from fresh foods, either collected, hunted or grown. Not processed to a point where they bear no resemblance to the original ingredients.

We are smart, we’re too smart to be duped by advertising suggesting that a product which now costs six times as much per ton since processing, is nutritionaly superior to the original product before processing. How could that be possible, processing generally degrades the nutritional content of food. It certainly adds to the cost of the food. Just price corn at the produce store and then compare the price of cornflakes. It’s a good business, turning corn into cornflakes. Then add more colours, more sugar, maybe change the shapes. The end product bears little resemblance to the original ingredients and the nutritional benefits are reduce more with every stage of the process.

The people of the world who live longest, have least cronic disease, are all living on diets with mainly unprocessed foods. Foods from farms, not from factories. Fresh food, live food.