Snarks and Solutions: Food Plus Air = Profits!!

Don't you love (and you know I mean love/hate) all the clever little trends that pop up in the world of processed food?  My current cringe-worth favorite right now is "food" puffed up with air, and then labeled as "fancy food" and sold for twice the price of the original.  This crossed my mind after I discovered how cheap and easy it is to puff air into homemade hand soap, but it's really pretty ridiculous once you think about it.

Of course, finger foods like Cheetos and toddler rice "puffs" have been around a while, but there seems to be some kind of new technology around that conveniently adds air to thick and gooey foods.

The first one I noticed was "Whipped" frosting.  Apparently, baking aisle pros were becoming savvy to the common practice of plunking a jar of frosting in the mixer, puffing it up, and covering two cakes with it instead of one, so they kindly took the work out of the process for the home cook, by pre-puffing the frosting, and then selling jars half full of air, for the same price.

Next in the line-up is pudding "mousse," which as far as I can tell is just normal pudding, maybe with added raspberry flavor to make it more "grown up" and "sophisticated," that has, as a special ingredient, you guessed it - AIR!  My favorite thing about this product is the marketing that advertises something like "half the fat and calories" of normal pudding.  Ha!  At least they are telling you that you're getting half the product for twice the price!

The newest addition to the "puff-it-with-air" phenomenon, I think, is Hershey's kisses that are filled with, not mint, cherry, or caramel flavor, but, you guessed it, AIR!!  Just what I've always wanted in my chocolate - air pockets.  I guess maybe these are supposed to have a mousse-y texture?

Okay, these wallet-stripping products might be semi-entertaining, but this  article describing "air filled emulsions" which could take the place of fats in low-fat foods. to "ease obesity" is closer to scary.  Not that the emulsions themselves necessarily sound that terrible, but the whole mentality of encouraging consumers to continually stuff their faces with air-puffed nothingness, instead of developing a healthy eating relationship with real, nutrition-packed foods seems like a step in the wrong direction.

I guess the solution here is obvious: if you don't want to be shelling out your hard earned money to eat food that is mostly air, just eat real food!

Posted at Fight Back Friday

Snarks and Solutions: A Candy Bar a Day Keeps the Doctor Away??

One of my favorite things about my husband's work is that we spend a lot of time hanging out with volunteers who come to do skilled work for us.  Most of our volunteers are retired handymen, contractors, mechanics, and the like, who are getting restless now that they don't have 9-to-5 jobs.  We really enjoy having these amazing, willing volunteers around, and I get a little spoiled being around such good humor and wisdom.

Anyhow, we had lunch with a few of our volunteers yesterday, and as we sat and chatted, the conversation turned to two of the gentlemen's diabetes, what medicine they were on, how often they did blood tests, and what their doctors had to say about the whole business.

Snark:
One of the men said, in an offhanded kind of way, "You know, when I first heard I had diabetes, I tried to get rid of all the sugar in my diet, but my doctor told me that we need a little bit of sugar every day to be healthy.  So I make sure I have a candy bar or a soda every once in a while."  The smirk on his face made it quite clear that he felt his doctor had given him an early Christmas present.

Oh, the angry thoughts that blazed through my brain!  Your doctor told you what?!  He said you needed sugar, but didn't make any distinction between, say, a candy bar and an apple?  I mumbled something about, "Well, you can get sugar from fruit and stuff too..." but didn't feel it was my place to say anything else.  The conversation moved along to types of blood testing, and I was left to stew over what I had just heard.

I have nothing against doctors.  I think they are (generally) incredibly intelligent, hard-working professionals who stuck it out through a ton of rigorous schooling so they could help people.  I do have a problem with unsuspecting doctors being fed a bunch of rubbish about sugar's valuable contribution to our diets, and then passing that information along to innocent patients, who accept it because "doctors always know best, right?"

Solution:
For the love of Pete, skip the daily candy bar and eat an apple instead.  Or an avocado.  Or a stick of butter (yes, I think that would win out over the candy bar... Mmm...)

And for the rest of us, I think this is another good example of needing to analyze everything we are told for ourselves, instead of just accepting it because the doctor, the professor, or the pharmacist, told us it is true.  While they may have a lot of specialized knowledge, they are human like the rest of us, and subject to misunderstanding or misinterpreting that knowledge.  They are also subject to being misinformed, unintentionally, or intentionally, by those who stand to profit from that misinformation.

Okay, now I sound like a full-blown conspiracy theorist (I am one, I just don't want you to know it).

Bottom line, sugar stinks, doctors shouldn't blindly advocate it, and we have some super awesome volunteers who don't need to be eating candy bars everyday, because we want them to live long, healthy lives so they can keep coming and helping us.... I mean, so they can be happy and feel good for a long time.

Snarks and Solutions: Processed Cheese Commercials

What drives you crazy?  Gets your goat?  Wets your whistle?  Chaffs your hide?  Wish you could do something about it?  Me too.  Well, confession is good for the soul, so who's ready for some catharsis?

Snark:

Have you seen the (relatively) new commercials for Kraft American Singles?  As patriotic music plays and footage rolls of happy children riding a school bus, we hear such statements as "This is America and this is our cheese," and "Let's feed them our cheese!"

Never mind that the stuff contains so little actual cheese that it can't legally be labeled as such, but must masquerade under the guise of "Pasteurized Prepared Cheese Product," according to Wikipedia  In fact, it used to be called "Pasteurized Process Cheese Food," until Kraft received a warning letter from the FDA informing them that their use of cheap, imported, powdered "milk protein concentrate" made the Singles ineligible for the official term "cheese food."  So now it's just "cheese product."

Another fun fact: those cute, individually wrapped little "slices" are not really slices of anything - they are individually poured into their plastic wrappers in the factory.  Eww...

Solution:


If you're going to eat cheese, just eat cheese!

Real cheese has been a staple of traditional cultures for thousands of years.  Traditional methods of aging cheese (often aged for more than 2 years) reduce its lactose content considerably, making it much easier to digest than uncultured milk.  In fact, aged cheeses are even allowed on the digestion-healing GAPs diet!  Real cheese is full of calcium, protein, and fat, and its low glycemic rating means it won't wreak havoc on your blood sugar.

Okay, it doesn't melt as (eerily) uniformly as American cheese, but why settle for a cheap substitute?  Eat the real thing!