[From the Nutritional Label of a Trail Mix. Photo is mine.]

If they want to sell us Frankenfood, perhaps it’s time to gather the villagers, light some torches and head to the castle.

~~Paul Lewis. From a letter to the New York Times in 1992. Lewis coined the term: Frankenfood.

Oh dear! While I was opening WordPress to write this blog post I noticed something. I did not successfully post a blog in December. This is shocking. Unheard of. Humiliating and embarrassing. That would be the FIRST TIME in over a decade of writing blogs for my deserving fans and followers that I have skipped a month.

I don’t know what to say.

Except that I digress.

The subject of this first post of 2026, the one you’re reading at the moment, is simply this: What are we putting into our bodies? You see, it all started when I was shopping at Price Chopper in Owego, NY. It was just before the dinner hour but I was searching for something I could nibble on during those long lonely dark hours past midnight when my insomnia is running on all cylinders. I love those little carrots, the little ones that look like the tiny fingers of a six-week old infant, only they are orange. But the little bits of carrot get stuck in my teeth, so they were out. Who doesn’t love a Toblerone? Well, me. Too much sugar at too late an hour.

Then I spied the brown bags all arranged on a rack just past the produce section. Brown bags means that their ecologically sound and healthy, right? Of course. So I placed a 28-oz bag into our cart and off we went to the checkout and then back to the Belva Lockwood Inn.

That’ll do me at 1:47 AM. That’ll get me through my nightly episode of Dark Night of the Soul.

On the second night of snacking from the brown bag of trail mix, I got bored so I began to read the label. I’m sure I’m not alone in this.

Well imagine my horror when I got to the bottom of the ingredient list. A statement.

Something in that bag, alongside the raisins, the peanuts, walnuts and other strange bits, somewhere in that bag was something I was about to put into my stomach. Something that is clearly stated is NOT FOOD.

There is a lot to consider when we think about the potential risks of GMO’s (Genetically Modified Organisms). I googled the labeling policy of the USA and the EU and found something interesting. In brief, the US is permissive while the EU is highly restrictive. The EU bans many US GM products, especially beef from GM-fed cattle, due to traceability rules. I am far from being an expert in the world of international guidelines regarding foodstuffs, but I have never been totally comfortable with consuming something that is…well, not found in nature.

I admit that I’m only giving this issue a perfunctory treatment. What people are willing to put into their diet is admittedly highly subjective. I recall hearing about Red Dye #2 when I was a teenager. Red M & M’s were not sold after a 1976 study linked. Apparently the public outcry was too great for Mars Co., and they brought back the red M & M much to the relief of millions. And to think that we had to make do with orange…

So what did I do about the brown bag of Trail Mix? Well, I ate it, most of it anyway. There are still a few of the goodies in the bottom of the bag, the peanuts, raisins and the little chunks of a ‘food’ product that isn’t wholly ‘real’.

By ‘real’, I mean someone picked it from a branch at some point, and not found it sitting at the bottom of a test tube.