Tommy Wilson: Limiting the damage of life's invoice

Do you find yourself in the supermarket slow lane, or zipping past the fuddy-duddy label scanners to the superfast zap-out lane? Photo / File

When you hit the sunset side - or second half of life as I call it - and head into survival mode, you start to look at every opportunity to limit the damage the first half has taken.

I call it the second-half invoice.

This is the invoice we all get, as a pay-it-forward for what we have eaten, inhaled, ingested, swallowed and sucked on in the first half of our lives.

The trick is to limit the damage of the invoice coming up ahead in the distance or, in my case, already delivered in the letterbox of life.

More and more I find myself scanning the labels - when I can read them without a microscope - of cans, bottles, cartons and frozen foods to see what is inside, and will it add or subtract to my pay it forward invoice.

There is a pattern emerging I see in supermarkets of invoice auditors, mostly my age, doing the same thing. We almost need a slow lane painted on the floor so the instant everything brigade can zip past to the zap out lane where scanning labels for price and proof of product are about as honest as each other in my opinion.

Then when you finally give it the clearance to land in your trolley after decoding how much sodium and white death (sugar) is inside you then have to face a barrage of check-out questions.

"Do you have a One Card, do you want one, have you had a nice day, will you want one?"

"Yes please, no thanks, can I go now please miss?"

And as for the receipt, why would I want to be reminded of this experience?

The real kicker in this robot-like pre-programmed shopping experience is when you arrive home and throw the bags up on the bench to unpack and face the next challenge of trying to open your packets of promises - without the use of a blowtorch or tungsten coated vice grips.

I mean who designs this packaging - Houdini?

Finally, you get your kai open with the help of your trusty scissors to protect what little teeth you have left.

And now - it's kai time.

You turn on the radio for a bit of soul food from John Campbell - and bugger me days it is what it is not. The label you have just brought and believed in, to help with the invoice is far from free range, natural or 100 per cent anything. It is pure b.s.

The recent free-range furore over how healthy the heihei (chooks) are who lay our eggs has opened up everyone's karu (eyes) to how honest the labels are on the outside of the kai we put inside our puku.

So who is the watchdog who watches over what we eat when it comes to free-range eggs? Is it the Commerce Commission, John Campbell, Countdown or Fair Go?

One thing is for sure, any label supposedly loyal to the naturally healthy free-range kaupapa (cause) needs a lot more scrutiny from those companies like Countdown, who we rely on to read and understand the promises made on their products, before we get sucked in to buying them.

Perhaps there can be a "heart tick" tohu (label) given to the free-range and organic products we look for when shopping for healthy kai?

"Don't panic - We are organic" was a great tee-shirt back in the day - when we were free-range hippies, and health and happiness went side by side. As it was for my Mum's generation and hers before her when kai came from our own back yard.

All of it totally free-range and organic, with not a lying label in sight to cut through with a pair of scissors.

Somehow since then we have got lost and if ever the time was right to return to organics and a free-range lifestyle, where we start foraging for our food in this kai basket we call the Bay of Plenty, it must be now.

If not, then just like our cleanest water we can no longer purchase to drink or swim in, our kai will suffer the same demise.

Meanwhile the invoice of life will continue to rack up a bill of bad health that hits you when you can least afford to pay for it.

Tommy Kapai is a best-selling author and writer. broblack@xtra.co.nz