Avoiding CHOW and MEALS

I was going to wait until Livvy posted again to put anything up, but this is burning a hole in my head, and Livvy is a slacker....

I've followed a sort of natural progression in my cooking and eating habits over the years. I decided I was sick of just eating the same old rotation of frozen vegetables, and wanted to cook with more fresh produce, so I bought Vegetables Every Day. Cooking with fresh produce made a natural progression into an interest in cooking more real food, and avoiding over-processed products. I'm not going to make my own bread (yet), but I find myself now obsessively examining the labels on the back of products in the grocery store. I only needed to get four days worth of food, and I had a list, but it still took us an hour because I kept having to sort through all the brands to find the one that was made with real ingredients, instead of refined, extruded, concentrated, processed, crap. The amount of crap that's in the 'food' available in stores astounds me. There's high fructose corn syrup in every damn thing you look at, from the obvious - like sodas, to the less obvious or expected - like salad dressing, and your bread. If they need to make it sweet, why the hell can't they just add some damn sugar?

Which brings me to the title of this post. I know Anna has read Good Omens, and I think the other two of you have. But I sat down to have my coffee this morning and it suddenly struck me that what I been so studiously avoiding in the grocery store last night were CHOW and MEALS.

CHOW contained spun, plaited and woven protein molecules, capped and coded, carefully designed to be ignored by even the most ravenous digestive tract enzymes... artifical sweeteners; mineral oils replacing vegetable oils; fibrous material, colorings, and flavorings. The end result was a foodstuff almost indistinguishable from any other except for two things. Firstly, the price, which was slightly higher, and secondly the nutritional content, which was roughly equivalent to that of a Sony Walkman. It didn't matter how much you ate, you lost weight. ...
MEALS was CHOW with added sugar and fat. The idea was that if you ate enough MEALS you would a) get very fat, and b) die of malnutrition.

Sounds eerily like what America is going through today, doesn't it? So that's my new years resolution. With the exception of candy (and I'm even going to work on that) I'm working to eliminate the CHOW and the MEALS from my family's diet. It's gonna mean making my own ice cream, or finding a place that sells Hagen-Daaz by the half-gallon. It isn't going to mean eating lower calorie foods, or less fried foods... but it is going to be a whole lot healthier.

If you're up for the reading, Unhappy Meals is an engrossing piece explaining how we started eating CHOW in the first place. You'll have to register for the NYTimes if you aren't already... or you can use bugmenot to borrow a login.