Sugar

The first food additive I'm going to complain about is Sugar.

Sugar in itself isn't such a bad thing. I like sweets, I like candy bars and I like a bit of sugar in my tea every morning. What I don't like is sugar being added to the food I eat in a sneaky manner.

I used to go to the supermarket and buy name brand spaghetti sauce in jars. I thought it was pretty decent, and that having spaghetti was a pretty healthy way to eat. After all, it's just a bit of garlic and herbs, perhaps some olive oil, and a bunch of tomatoes, right? Well, I started to read the ingredient list and saw sugar in the list. Why add sugar? Simply said, the tomatoes used in sauce might not be ripe enough, so they add sugar to counteract the under-ripe tomatoes they are using. A name brand italian sauce I used started to add sugar after they were purchased by a large conglomerate and introduced it with banners saying "new better recipe"! Yeah, right. Sugar is also useful as a preservative, so the sauce will last longer on the shelf. Better ways of adding a bit of sweetness would be to add caramelized garlic, onions and/or carrots (thought I'm not a big fan of carrots myself in pasta sauce).

Sugar is also often added to bread. Sometimes this is to kick off the yeast, though I find in experience that I don't really need to do this. Often it is added as a preservative to keep the bread on the shelves longer. While still living in America, I noticed, strangely, that most bread had High-Fructose Corn Syrup added to it. The sweetness really doesn't make the bread taste that much better, it's just so that the bread can sit on the shelves for a couple of weeks and still be 'fresh'.

I'm not so much against sugar itself, I just don't like it being sneaked to my food. I'll just stick to having sugar in my tea..

Food Additives

I've decided to start blogging about nasty food additives. More and more as I look at the food I buy, I see things finding their way into products, that I don't want in them. It might be to make them 'tastier', it might be to make them last longer or it might be to make them cheaper. All I know is, I don't want them in my food.

I've been thinking of commenting on the additives I've been noticing one by one. I want to discuss why I think they're included, what they are, and why I don't like it.

This has been an idea floating in my head for quite some time, but as I noticed some weird ingredients showing up in some chocolate I was thinking of buying today, I finally decided to start writing about it.