I have been trying to wean myself off of processed foods for a while now. That process has sped up in the last few months because I've been doing a deep dive on the labels of everything I consume, and it's been an eye-opener.
I stopped drinking diet sodas years ago because the labels were too full of weird chemicals. That reasoning didn't apply to anything else I ate or drank at the time, however. My label-reading habits intensified when I went low-carb, but I still wasn't paying attention to everything on the labels.
A couple of months ago, I was texting with a friend of mine who is a nurse. She said that her hospital had been seeing "all kinds of weird cancers" lately and that it was making her reassess everything that she was eating, drinking, and putting on her body. She went so far as to start making her own cleaning solutions and laundry detergent.
That conversation got me paying better attention. I was already making my own salad dressings and hot sauces because I like doing things from scratch. I'm not exactly Pioneer Kruiser in the kitchen now, but there are far fewer packages in the pantry and fridge than there used to be. The hot sauce thing has become a minor obsession. I even went back to Facebook to join a fermentation group.
I've also changed my cheese and butter preferences. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Costco's Kirkland grass-fed butter had the shortest label and the cleanest ingredients. On the external front, I use cleaner soap now because that's a thing.
While I am aware that years of taking an "ignorance is bliss" attitude to food labeling could have done plenty of damage, I also believe that it's never too late to nuke a bad habit. The fact that I have never been a big consumer of junk, fast, or snack foods has probably helped me a little.
I haven't started making my own cleaning and laundry products yet, but I have researched them. If any of you fine readers have your own concoctions, please share them in the comments. That goes for hot sauce recipes (fermented or unfermented) as well.
Heck, the more homemade stuff, the better, especially post-apocalypse.
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