Village Squire, 1976-04, Page 341
Escaping the horror of food additives
BY KEITH ROULSTON
Charlie Bramwell used to live in our
neighbourhood. He was a quiet guy for most
of his life .just another schnook that people
looked right through at the supermarket as
they hurried to pick up a pound of ground
chuck.
Charlie's house was just down the street
from ours and I must confess I never took
much notice of him. That all changed though
one year when Charlie went to a fall fair and
dropped by a booth where the hawkers were
stressing the importance of a good diet to
health. They were promoting their own brand
of health foods. Charlie, being careful with
his money, didn't buy anything. But the seed
planted.
He went home and he worried, as he ate his
bacon and eggs that night. He began, he told
me later, to think what that greasy bacon was
doing to his stomach. He could almost feel it.
He worried too when he broke out the heavily
buttered chelsey rolls for desert. Half way
through he threw it in the garbage (he
wouldn't feed it too his dog Joe because of
what it might do to his internal workings)
Charlie worried and worried, and went for
two days without eating a thing but oatmeal
porridge, before he finally journeyed to a
health food store over in the next town where
reluctantly, with a feeling for his thin
bankroll, he stocked up on stone ground flour,
and all the other essentials of good diet. All
the winter the only time he showed up at the
local stores was to buy some fresh vegetables
and fruit- But by about March, he'd stopped
doing that too. He'd been reading, he told
Mari Smith at the super market, about all the
sprays and chemical fertilizers and so on they
used in the growing of those crops. What, he
worried, was this doing to him? Was he
building up residues in his body that would
shorten his life? Turn him into a freak?
So he stopped showing up at the vegetable
counter for food though what he did for the
nett few months I don't know. Perhaps he
fasted.
Anyway, when spring came Charlie could
be seen out working in his back yard. He had
a big rambling house, an old barn left over
from the days when horses were in vogue in
tam, and about two acres of scrubby land
He had decided to grow his own food so he
could make sure it was pure. He even hired in`
a farmer who kept draft horses for a hobby in
order to make sure that a tractor wouldn't
kave any gas fumes that might ruin the soil
This was all very well with the neighbours
They joked a little about Charlie going off the
deep end, but he ignored them They couldn't
ignore him, however, when he was ready for
planting, Good vegetables need fertilizer and
32, VILLAGE SQUIRE/APRIL 1976
Charlie was going to have the best. So he had
a local pig farmer bring in 10 loads of manure
to spread on his field. It was then, that
Charlie began to be noticed no matter where
he went in town. His neighbours were even
set to take up a petition.
But once the smell died down, so did the
stink the neighbours raised and everything
went pretty peacefully all summer.
It even got that when the vegetables grew
ready in the fall, all the neighbours were
trying to get friendly again because the
fertilizer had done its job and this was prize
produce.
But that winter, after months of eating
cabbage and turnips and parsnips and canned
pickles and frozen peas and corn and
what -have -you, that Charlie began to yearn
for a little more variety in his diet. He longed
for some meat and eggs and milk, but these
were all too rich foods for him. But then he
heard about goats' milk, and soon had a half
dozen goats housed in the barn. The trouble
was that they weren't in the barn often
enough. More often they went visiting and
they weren't at all fussy about their djet
1.fter they ate Mrs. Hooliday's brand new
perma-prest, titted, flowered bed spread off
her clothes line, Charlie was again the object
of a good deal of hostility in the
neighbourhood.
Then he heard about a special breed of
chickens that laid low -cholesterol eggs. Soon
he had a small flock of the hens that clucked
around the back yard and a rooster that
crowed loud and long every morning at
precisely 6:45. This did not endear him to his
next door neighbour Marvin Hicks who
worked the night shift and had just arrived
home settled into bed every morning at 6:30.
The neighbours were about ready to lynch
Charlie. Some had approached town council
to see if anything could be done .'even
suggesting tar and feathers, preferably from
his own chickens. They needn't have
bothered. One morning they no longer had to
worry about Charlie or his farm. They took
him to the hospital in an ambulance and he
was dead a few days later. The doctor said it
was a bleeding ulcer, probably brought on
because of all .the worrying he did about
protein; cholesterol, vitamins and weed
sprays.
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