In an earlier post, I ranted about the dreaded Traveler´s Diarrhea, or TD.

In that post, I specifically mention that if the TD lasts more than three days, then you should seek medical help, because it´s NOT going to go away on it´s own. I had to use my own advice this past week.

And a quick word of warning should you become extremely gastronomically distressed while out there in the big, wide world – remember that it is KEY that you seek medical treatment in the country in which you were sickened. Never go home feeling ill in the belly and expect the Western Medical Establishment to be able to help you.

The  country in which you acquired the disease is accustomed to dealing with it on a daily basis. Most of the time, you can march down to the corner drugstore, tell the clerk your symptoms and they will prescribe the effective treatment for you on-the-spot.

Once, I made the mistake of drinking some bad water right before I got onto a plane bound from the jungle to LAX. When I got sick, I thought, ¨Great. I´m headed to my home city, where there are the best doctors in the world!¨

Wrong. The Western Medical Establishment is great for some things -  like if you´ve been in a car wreck or need to have your internal organs put back together. But hear me . . . most know nothing about effective treatment of parasites. Actually, with global travel becoming more commonplace, the instances of traveler´s coming home with nasty parasites is ever-increasing.

My well-heeled US doctors put me through a continual battery of tests that came out negative, but I knew something was wrong. They told me I was crazy.  If you feel you have an intestinal parasite, it´s imperative that you become your own strongest advocate (even though you may not have alot of energy to do so). After six months of problematic doctor visits, I finally had a friend bring some meds back from abroad and that finally fixed it. My doctors, all the way from my general practitioner to gastroenterologist at Cedars-Sinai, were all well-meaning, but clueless.

This time, the problem got fixed with some meds from the drugstore. All for less than $10.00 US. My US medical file is about 2¨ thick from the time when I was sick before. I wonder how much all of that cost the insurance company. I certainly know it cost me a great deal in time, anxiety and sickness – let alone dollars. And they still weren´t able to fix it, diagnose it or listen to me, the patient. It was as though they were offended that I might be trying to diagnose myself.

Trust me, fix it in the country where you got sick.

I am really excited as a US citizen that we are finally acquiring a new administration.

Do I think our problems as a country or as a society or as a . . . ahem . . . global village will be instantaneously eradicated? No.

My outlook on politics is generally fairly dismal. I really do believe that Obama will try as best he can to ‘fix things,’ but his hands are really kind of tied in many ways – first of all, the prior administration did everything possible to make ‘change’ really difficult. Secondly, the bigger problem is that Americans as a whole, I believe, are not truly ready to embrace the kind of change that needs to happen to make any difference anyway. Most of us are just still too comfortable and quite frankly, still very much asleep as far as some gigantic problems are concerned – problems that could very well inhibit our very existence.

Until we wake up and demand true change, status quo will continue it’s relentless march onward, simply re-naming itself on many levels as ‘change.’ We must not forget the power that we have as a people. We showed that power for the first time during the election. In droves, in communities, together as a force, we asked for something different – and we got it with a resounding ‘Yes, we can!’ But it’s imperative that we keep demanding – together – in a determined manner for exactly what we want. Otherwise we will keep allowing those politicians to silently stuff their pockets in the name of change while the planetary conditions continue to deteriorate.

As I said before, in the past, it’s been quite easy for me to fall into the media-made machine of fear and spiral down into realms of hopelessness when I think of things like Monsanto, factory farming, society’s mass acceptance of debt, war and the destruction of our living planet earth, which is the very organism that sustains us. So, I’m not gonna go there and begin harping on all of those depressing things today.

Today, I’m just another human being on this great big planet, walking down a muddy dirt road. I’m surrounded  by mamacitas on the street, selling plates of rice and vegetables for US 0.75 cents to passerby. There’s a guy on a bicycle with a home-made platform attached to the front. The wooden platform is overflowing with grapes and electrical equipment. He’s holding a microphone to his mouth. The loudspeaker blares his words, “Uvas! ‘Migas, uvas! Uvas!” Grapes, friends, grapes!

It may seem as though I’m ignoring this great day in history, but it’s the opposite. I’m acutely aware of the transition that’s happening today in my home country. I’m staying far, far away from media and television and internet new sites today. I’m instead focusing on this beautiful moment unfolding in front of me, because really, that’s all I’ve got. And whether you are awake or still dreaming the defunct American dream, that’s all you’ve really got too.

Be aware. Be not one of the cogs in the purposefully generated machine of fear. Wake up. Start really noticing these moments that are all around. Listen to your little voice that whispers inside. That loud one on the outside is doing nothing but propagating fear – exactly what is not needed.

And slowly, slowly, one by one as we wake from the collective nightmare, we can realize our power. Then and only then can true and lasting change transform this crazy world into a better place. Join me in the NEW dream where corporations don’t own the rights to life itself, where the world monetary system will not burden our children’s children, a place where genocide is dead and a time when our planet, our mother who sustains us, is healthy again.

Yes, we truly can – dream a new collective dream, that is.

I decided to consult a friend who is a chef regarding my trashing the tomatoes rant and his input not only surprised me, but in the end, he offered a brilliant and quite viable solution that would be easy to implement in every home and restaurant.

My friend the chef is passionate about the food he serves; it has to be perfect. He says that his number one concern is giving his customer a meal of gastronomic delight that doesn’t make them sick. In my tomato example he says that as a chef he would never want to spread any disease like Hepatitis, even though the chances of something like this happening in my example are near zero.

“I would eat the tomatoes myself,” he says, “but even if every single person in that hot dog line said, ‘Hey, it’s cool. Go ahead, serve those tomatoes,’ I would not do it. I’d throw them in my compost bin.”

“That’s great!” I roared. And it really is! “But . . . no restaurants have a compost bin.”

It would be the perfect solution. I thought about suggesting composting in that last rant, but really believed it was just wishful thinking. That is, until I spoke to my friend. That’s really the whole point - I don’t care if something gets ‘trashed’ in the compost bin; it’s the mindless waste and filling up our landfills that I have a problem with. Plus, nationwide composting in restaurants would create enough quality mulch to solve alot of our nation’s oil-based fertilizer problem that’s raping the planet of nitrogen reserves.

According to Lester Brown’s book, Plan B (which every single person absolutely should read in my opinion), US agriculture in 2004 produced 11.8 billion bushels of corn and used 10 billion tons of nitrogen-based fertilizer to do it. A bushel is not that big – 35.24 liters - compared to one ton of fertilizer. Incidentally that nitrogen-based fertilizer is made with – that’s right – petroluem products. This is an unsustainable model; composting on a massive scale is not only sustainable, it is viable.

This viability is key. The oil-government powers that be, who incidentally subsidized those same 2004 farmers to the tune of $4.5 billion in taxpayer dollars (to enrich their oil empire), would say that composting on a massive scale is not viable and too complicated and that restaurants would never be able to implement such a system.

My friend the chef says otherwise. He worked for two years at a four star restaurant in Yellowstone Park and they composted every single scrap available. What’s more is that the corporate restaurant he worked for actually made money in the composting business. Lots of money, according to my friend.

So, guess what corporate restaurant America?? Lots of money can be made on trash. And a four star, sustainable and massive composting model is already in operation.

Until our society comes to it’s senses, insanity will abound . . . all in an effort to side-step the possibility of financial fallout or social faux pas. While thankfully what I witnessed last week at Pink’s hot dog stand in Hollywood wasn’t life-threatening in nature, it was ridiculously wasteful – all because of society’s perception of litigation. Oh yeah, that and germs.

We were happily standing in the historically famous, possibly hours-long line for some of tinsel town’s most sought-after chili dogs. The hustling crew endlessly cranked out specialty dog after specialty dog, continuously dropped fries into grease vats  and restocked the dog toppings en masse. Not long after our arrival into the line, one of the harried workers tossed two gallon-sized containers of chopped tomatoes onto the side counter and turned her back for two seconds in an effort to multi-task.

A semi-scraggly guy came around the corner just at that moment with a plastic ounce sized container, dipped it into the tomatoes and walked away. I should mention this man appeared to be neither homeless nor dirty; he just wasn’t as . . . shall we say . . . upscale in appearance as the majority of people who frequent Melrose Avenue.

Someone called out, “Hey! That guy just dipped his hand in the tomatoes!” He did not, for the record, dip his actual hand into anything.

Ten seconds later, the same worker who’d put the containers on the counter dumped both of them into the trashcan with a loud thud. This kind of mindlessly wasteful behavior appals me. I said to Matt, “I can’t believe they just dumped that stuff out . . . ”

Opinions are like assholes; everyone has one. People on either side of us in line indeed had their own opinions and did not hesitate to share them with me. The guy in front of us said with a chuckle, “Well, you know they gotta throw that stuff out or else they could get sued for serving it after that guy messed with it.”

“But you and I both know that his actions didn’t contaminate two gallons of perfectly fine tomatoes,” I said. The man in front of us sort of guffawed and turned back to his newspaper. And of course, I understand that they had to actually toss the stuff in the can in front of the crowd just so all eyes could confirm that the offending tomatoes were properly disposed of.

The couple behind me (who I believe were the same ones who alerted the staff to the actions of the tomato-contaminator) began to chat. The man said, “You just never know what germs people carry.”

“On their . . . ahem . . .  mouth area. On their hands. Who knows where that cup has been . . . ” said his over-perfumed lady friend.

Seriously?! People . . . I hate to mention it, but c’mon,  we live in the richest, most wasteful country on the entire planet. And because an establishment has to factor in the possibility of lawsuits from germophobic patrons, we help create and contribute to a culture of waste. It saddens and sickens me to the core.

I was raised by elderly people who remember the Great Depression. The media today tells us that we are now facing a possible depression of even greater enormity. The increase in food prices is alarming. Throwing away two gallons of tomatoes may not sound like a big deal to a group of people who don’t know what it’s like to be hungry, but in my mind, it is a big deal and it’s indicative of a much bigger problem.

One of my best friends tells a story about his aunt who found half a donut in the street when she was a child during the Great Depression. She picked up the half donut out of the dirty cobblestone street, took it home and shared it with her six family members, who all remember that half-eaten donut as a very special treat.

I hope that spoiled rotten Americans don’t have to scrounge the streets for food necessities ever again. I’ve certainly never had to do it, even though my family did spend several winters with no heat and little more than government cheese and rice to eat. As this article explains, don’t believe for one minute that America is immune to food shortages, because just the opposite is true – if anything, we are susceptible to them. Certainly there can be a happy medium. That includes re-educating the masses about perceptions about germs, wastefulness and litigation, because I assure you the kind of seemingly innocent event I witnessed last week happens quite often all over the developed world.

I hate to cry out cliches about starving children, so I won’t, because we’ve all heard them ad nausem, but with the problems our world faces right now with food shortages and inflated prices (just ask any Zimbabwean how much a loaf of bread costs) and foodstuffs being used as agrofuels, we’d all better start realizing just how important every little bit of precious food is increasingly becoming. By the way, it costs a $10 billion Zimbabwe note (worth less than $20USD) for a loaf of bread.

The canary is singing in the coalmine of our backyard, but we’re too plugged into our I-pods to even notice. If our ancestors were here to witness commonplace acts of American wastefulness, the faux pas would be on our society. I hope we don’t have to worry about something as basic as where we’re going to get our next meal. And maybe, just maybe if we all have an about-face in our perceptions of what is acceptable, we won’t have to worry. But if we do, at least it will be a sobering lesson for all of us spoiled rotten Americans. I’m not so sure that those lessons would be a bad thing.

Do I blame the busy worker at Pinks? No. I blame our perception of what is acceptable. Did I continue to stand in the line that day? Certainly not. I wandered on in search of my next meal elsewhere on the streets of America.

Matt and I went to Applebee’s a few nights ago to say hello to an old friend of his who works there.

We waited at the bar until his friend got off work. The bar faucet was gushing out steaming hot water at full blast, draining out of a teeny, tiny little sink that never filled up. The water was on when we sat down, so who knows how long it had been on before our arrival? The entire time, the lone bartender ran around frantically texting, I-phone in hand, screaming every detail of the Ebay bid she was trying to win.

Finally, after about fifteen minutes, when I could stand it no more, I said gently, “You know, I come from a place where we have to conserve water. Can you turn the faucet off? Please?”

I should mention that this bartender seems to be a very nice lady. She’s a friend of the friend we were there to meet. She talked about how she had signed up for a bell-ringing shift for the Salvation Army. We even had a few beers together later in the night, where she apologized a second and third time about the faucet. I cannot help but wonder if she apologized because she realized the need for water conservation or if her reason revolved around the social pressure of my pointing it out.

Just one state over from South Carolina, where this runaway faucet event occurred sits Atlanta. Lake Lanier is it’s main water source. Just one year ago Lake Lanier was so low from drought, mis-management and overuse that Atlanta measured it’s quickly dwindling available water supply in terms of weeks and officials declared an emergency.

Only when the faucets run dry will people realize that there is no more water. We’ve got the technology at our fingertips, literally, so that we don’t have to lug water from wells anymore. But this technology has contributed to our mindlessness.

I’m not perfect; I’m here to educate and bring awareness. Guess what? Everyone is from a place that has to conserve water.