Food entry #3 - Finally talking about ingredients

I think I'm done with my tangents.  Here's what I wanted to talk about - all the crap in our food.

Once upon a time, I felt conscientious because not only did I not eat things like Hot Pockets, but I also made most of our meals from scratch.  You know, I didn't buy things like Hamburger Helper.  *flexes sexy domestic muscles*

I didn't realize quite how pervasive things like partially hydrogenated vegetable oils were (aren't they mostly just in things like potato chips?), or high fructose corn syrup (just kidding, I know everything contains HFCS), or MSG.  Some naive part of me thought weird stuff wasn't in our food because we're not living in the Industrial Revolution and sticking weird things in our meat and thickening our foods with sawdust.  And, somehow, the cheap food should be healthy, too, because shouldn't normal, natural things be cheaper than something that has to be manufactured?  Silly me!  (Thanks a lot, government, for providing subsidies to food producers to artificially cheapen crap food.  I also love Monsanto and everything they do for our food supply.  NOT.)

One day, I thought about my roommate who introduced me to Adam's peanut butter and started wondering about things like partially hydrogenated vegetable oils.  Why was her peanut butter so special?  Because it was made of only things like (gasp!) peanuts and salt!  You have to stir the peanut butter and store it in the fridge because that's what it will do naturally if you don't add other stabilizing-type oils.  I decided to check the ingredient labels on the peanut butter at the store and only buy the stuff that had, like, two ingredients: peanuts and salt.  One day, Mark said he didn't like how the peanut butter separated, so I decided I could settle for peanut butter containing stuff like palm oil (at least it's not partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, right?)  Unfortunately, Costco hasn't gotten the memo, and I have to buy peanut butter in small containers from the regular store because the Jif and Skippy peanut butter Costco carries contains PHVOs (heck, I'll use an abbreviation for partially hydrogenated vegetable oils).  Le sigh!!  The store brands still contain weird oils, so I buy Jif (which contains palm oil.)

Funny story: It seemed like about 3 months after I started looking for only natural peanut butter, several types of "natural" peanut butter started showing up on the shelf.  Hm, apparently everyone else watches the same documentaries I do!

Another funny story: We also started buying and using reusable shopping bags around the time we got married (2006?)  Everyone at the grocery store thought we were THE COOLEST PEOPLE EVER for having our own reusable bags.  Or maybe they were jealous because we had WinCo bags (from Boise, where Mark grew up) and we didn't have a WinCo in Utah yet.  Either way, I think we are pretty awesome.

Um, I promise to get back on topic tomorrow. ;)