And it all started at dinnertime. . .

This weekend, my children returned from visiting "down home," so I took the opportunity to restock my freezer. Soon the season of chicken noodle soup, stew and various pot pies will be upon us. I ordered my groceries via Peapod, because I was feeling like a lazy bum. As I shopped, I noticed chicken breasts were $1.79/lb. Who could pass up such a steal? I presumed the chicken simply needed to be frozen (Side note: I almost typed "freezed" and it took an embarrassing amount of time to figure that was not right) as soon as it arrived. What I discovered was much worse.

America, one single chicken breast should NEVER be bigger than the person about to eat it. I'm telling you - my chicken breast was four feet high. Maybe I'm exaggerating a little, but just a little. I cut it in HALF, and my kids said, "Mama...this is just too much chicken." Do you comprehend the gravity of two black children saying that chicken in ANY variety is "too much?"

It's really a damned conspiracy. Read here to get some perspective on what I'm saying. No coincidence that the poorest state in the nation is also the fattest. There's the main reason is lean meats, fresh fruits and veggies can be cost prohibitive. I've said it a million times: there is no reason a chicken leg should be one price and the chicken breast should be another. I will not sacrifice this argument until you point me to the Peruvian All Breasted chicken. No legs, no thighs; nothing but titties popping out all over the place on the chicken. Also, try explaining why 20 oz. of fresh pineapple slices is $4.99 and 20 oz. of canned is $1.79. Anybody seen a canned pineapple tree? If you think that simply going the lean meat, fresh produce route is expensive, think about the cost disparity when you go organic.

Then, when these healthier choices ARE in the price range of poor people, they are completely FUBAR. Plums with more bugs crawling inside of it than actual plum flesh, bananas that look like active participants in a Mexican hat dance-off and chicken breasts so injected with growth hormones that they ARE AS BIG AS A MAN! (It's also no coincidence that even when the children are not morbidly obese, they look like grown men and women. You should not have 38-24-36 proportions when you are ten years old.) So they're screwed even when they do what they are thinking is the right thing.

But, as Chris Rock said, "The money ain't in the cure, the money is the medicine." Diabetes, heart disease, cancer - these are all medical cash cows people!!! It also provides fodder for those with the "us vs. them" mentality. "Look at how they eat!"

If you're not rich, this country will do it's damnedest to keep you poor. You buy a car and go to work to pay for it, but you have to get another job to pay for gas and parking. You have kids, and you work to provide for them, but you have to get ANOTHER to afford child care unless you plan to entrust your kids to the "raper man." You pay for medical & hospitalization insurance that you may spend five years not really needing; but the moment you require a treatment that falls an inch outside of their stringent guidelines, you're sick and SOL.

So what's a scratchin' and survivin' single mother to do? Go home, eat the genetically mutated chicken (because though I'm not "poor," I damned sure don't have money to waste chicken) and pray that I don't have to buy a bra for my six year old next week.