Madhuri

Ok, this is a big fat rant, about two things almost impossible to find in this consuming-mad, insectoidally-voracious, provide-anything-whatsoever-and-somebody-will-buy-it world. I’ll start with the bread, ha ha, and work up to the bras, though it just sounded better to put the latter first in the title. Ha ha. (I’m full of impish delight this morning because there’s one thing you really can find if you look, and that’s great, black, low-voiced, organic free-trade chocolate. I love it on organic spelt or kamut sourdough toast with a drizzle of organic olive oil and a few grains of Himalayan pink crystal salt. Which brings us back to bread:) See, most of the bread-eating Western cultures eat wheat almost exclusively. Most of this is grown in the American Breadbasket states, and shipped far and wide. Whole grains have nutritionally-potent oils in them which easily go bad – best to eat the grains as soon as possible after harvest. It’s my nose’s observation that many whole-grain products – crackers, brown rice, and so on – are stale by the time one has bought them. This means the oils have ‘turned’ – and have become something nasty for your health, full of free radicals. I’m forever having to return such to the store.

So, to prevent this ‘turning,’ the agriculture industry has been lacing stored grains with preservatives. As well, the stored grains are apt to get fungi, so they are doused with fungicides. These last are really unpleasant for humans to get into their bodies – they’ll make you bloated, miserable, comatose. This effect is not the same thing as celiac disease – I don’t think I have that at all – but celiac disease is another wheat-forbidding factor in this phenomenon of which I am speaking, to wit: how frustrating it is not to be able to get any bread that isn’t going to make me bloat out as if I’m nine months gone and then fall asleep steeped in a general feeling of idiocy.

It’s my contention that most people are allergic to these fungicides and thus most people are bloated and slumbrous, and require strong doses of caffeine to wake themselves up again (thus cappucino after pasta.) I submit that most fattish sort of people, dropping wheat from their diets, would size down nicely. I myself suffered agonies of shame until I was fifty-three, when I stopped eating wheat at the suggestion of a healer. Until then, I’d wake each morning slim and lithe, my clothes went on just fine; and by evening my trousers would no longer fasten, my belly stuck out like a famine-ballooned child’s, and I was full of terrible face-flaming chagrin. Since I stopped eating wheat my tummy stays the same size all day give or take a bit – nothing like the watermelonishness of before. It has changed my life, this discovery – I’m vain.

Now, I love toast. And I don’t like yeast. Maybe it’s because I battled candida with a really boring diet for two years, but I want nothing to do with yeastie-beasties if I don’t have to, so I prefer sourdough bread – which sourdough is from a culture that is arguably yeast of some sort; but I won’t worry about that because for whatever reason my body is fine with it and isn’t with usual yeast. And if I go to a healthfood store in the States or Canada or Western Europe I can generally find sourdough spelt, kamut, or rye bread, and that’s great, only $6.99 a loaf in the frozen section. What I’m complaining about here is the fact that going out to eat brings me up against the astonishingly narrow-minded attitude that prevails: wheat is the only grain. Didn’t you know that? What would a person do with those other grains we barely know exist? In fact we’d all benefit by courageously sampling different grains, and then making them more available – even in, gasp, restaurants! Sandwich places! I’m tired of going out to eat and coming home carb-starved while my companion has happily devoured the whole basket of hot French bread with butter (don’t get me started on the butter with Bovine Growth Hormone in it, which makes a woman’s breasts decide heavily they’d better try to make milk for a calf.) And I’ve had to make do with white rice (another peeve, of course.)

So, Y’all, restaurateurs – compassionate bread please! Plump hot organic spelt or quinoa or kamut rolls! Organic butter! Olive oil! And while you’re at it, brown rice! Quinoa pilaf! Abolish the ball-belly! The poor udder-ducted bosom!

Ok, now to bras. Oh bras, bras, we don’t want to burn them anymore, we did it and we grew grave with gravity, we like feeling supported here where our love-bumps stick out, where our heart-space rests to shine on the world from. We like a nice stretchy-but-not-too band around our backs telling us that indeed we are encircled and hoisted up. We like a bit of padding between ourselves and the elbows of humanity (well, I do – breasts are of course sensitive and too, like I said I’m vain.) And we like pretty – oh how we like pretty. Bows, lace, color, softness – a secret beneath our clothes, sweet and self-hugging where no-one can see, until an important one sees. But what does the underwear industry give us, really just about exclusively? Plastic bras! Spun petrochemicals! Black sump from deep beneath the hapless sea, sucked up in mammoth pipes, sent pushing to factories in the fifty-square-mile Ooze Bayou between Houston and Galveston, and subjected to flabbergastingly clever machinery to turn out – things that look like lace made by patient slaves in 1860’s France! But aren’t! Are instead – really complicated Saran Wrap, with a few air holes (i.e. lace) to give it peace and space, maybe! Your breasts are shrink-wrapped! Your soft tender love-sourced breasts are entrusted to the stuff of Wal-Mart crap! Dictated-to-China fantasy! Dioxin-laden plastic bottles heated by body-warmth delivering chemical information to your pink or brown lovelies! Information it could do without! All day long! and half the night! With underwires to keep the shape strong and conduct strange electricities! Don’t go out in a lightning storm, oh Global-warmed woman!

Now, all of this would be very well – a matter of choice – were it possible to buy natural fabric bras. But it really is nearly impossible! Unless you want flattening sports bras which look like men’s underwear! I have been looking on the Net and it truly is exceeding rare to find bras in cotton or bamboo (a wonderful fabric, like silk) or silk itself, particularly without underwires but with a bit of protective and flattering padding. The only ones I’ve found have been from Victoria’s Secret and these have not a single hint of lace anywhere about them – as if liking natural fabrics means you have to be punished by having your femininity removed. The only other country where cotton bras are occasionally seen is England; however, these are never lacy either.

Now, the problem couldn’t be that cotton or silk lace can’t be made – obviously. The same wildly complex programs that make plastic curlicues can make them in silk or bamboo. Little ladies going blind with needles in garrets not needed. So what is the problem, lingerie makers? It’s not as if a person can make her own bras at home, we’re at your mercy, and presumably you’re not diabolical, presumably you want to make money – and I’m ready to give you some – but then for godssake make nice undies, with panties to go with the bras so a woman can feel uber-doted-on and oh so lucky to be in her skin! I’d love to send this rant to CEOs of lingerie companies but I do so doubt they’d ever get to read it, are too busy changing mistresses in Antigua, and even then wouldn’t care – they are making so much money already, manufacturing underthings which will end up in a landfill one of these days un-decaying for the next 5,000 years! The imprint of someone’s particular bulges still worn into them! Or getting into the waterways, snagging on a branch and staying there undissolved until the roseate-bon-bon-holster floats by and by into the ocean, gets caught into the currents, and ends up in a Tropic Gyre inside a hapless jellyfish who thought it was a colorful meal! You would be able to see the thing inside him if you were out there in a boat in that plastic-paved whirlpool the size of Africa! And too Victoria’s Secret! Take heed! It’s not only all this, but you guys hire morons to (wo)man your phones! No doubt stunned by flourescent lights and wheaten snacks! They screw the orders all up! Reliably! Every time! It’s really gnarly to deal with you! And to go through all that for plain unadorned businesslike if well-made, absolutely lace-less bras! Not even a bow! Have mercy!