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Is a Freezer Right For You?

I don’t know how many times I can say it: yes, Yes, YES! It doesn’t matter if you’re single, a single parent, or just short of space.

I understand some of us are blessed with more cupboard space and hiding places than others, and that buying canned foods can be more convenient, but real foods beat canned or otherwise processed hands down for nutrition. This is important to know in an age of dwindling health care insurance and Medicare availability.

Most canned and processed foods have chemicals in them to ensure a long shelf life, and the FDA has not tested these chemicals—they aren’t required to be. The long shelf life is necessary for these foods because manufacturers spew them out in boxcar lots, then await orders for delivery from grocery store and warehouse chains. Those orders can take a long time to materialize, and having foods expire on the warehouse floor is a bad thing for profits.

So finally an order DOES arrive for cases of Brand X beans—after sitting on the warehouse floor for months (or even years), it gets trucked to Store Y, where the stock can sit in THEIR warehouse for weeks or months more before it ever sees shelf space…then how long do you suppose it sits on the shelf, awaiting final purchase? After you've bought it, how long will it sit on YOUR shelf? Meanwhile, the food inside those cans and boxes is deteriorating (losing nutrients)—by the time you actually eat it, it may be already completely depleted of any useful nutrients.

Do whatever you have to do—rent, borrow, or steal (just kidding) freezer space to provide adequate amounts of nutrients to yourself or your family without the shelf-life-preserving chemicals. Since the FDA has not tested the chemicals, nobody knows for sure if they are responsible for causing cancer, genetic defects, or other equally devastating health malfunctions.

Back in her apartment, Wenchypoo herself decided to sacrifice her dining room table and chairs in order to fit her small chest freezer in the kitchen area. Since moving from 2 acres to 2 bedrooms, space has become a premium and many careful choices were made about what furniture to keep and which to yard sale. Since the dining table mostly got used to hold up a sewing machine, it got ditched...very little eating ever went on over it anyway (that's what the couch is for). Since there are no kids in the family, we can get away with it (no mess). This is how important a freezer is to us.

Nowadays, we now have a house, and we STILL don't have a dining room table. My little chest freezer sits in the spare bedroom we call a pantry, surrounded by shelves of non-perishables.

Posted by Cute at 7:00 PM

Labels: financial (non-tax), food purchases, health