I was in the juice aisle at the grocery store last night looking for some cranberry juice. I was reading labels and whatnot because it seems that the only place I can get 100% cranberry juice with no other juice added and no added sugar or anything just 100% juice from cranberries is Whole Foods. I was trying to find the bottle with the largest proportion of cranberry juice. Apple juice is not cranberry juice, white grape juice is not cranberry juice…and you want to know something else? High fructose corn syrup is not cranberry juice.
What the fuck is high fructose corn syrup doing in juice?? It doesn’t need to be in fruit juice, fruit juice is already sweet. Ah, yes, corn is cheap, hfcs is cheaper than juice. So just use some fruit, some water and a lot of hfcs and sell it as juice. It’s cheaper that way. But that’s just the problem isn’t it? When i go grocery shopping I can afford to look at labels. I can afford to buy the juice, the spaghetti sauce, the bread, the lunch meat, the WHATEVER that doesn’t have all the hfcs and other crap packed into it.
But what if you can’t afford that? Pretty much only Classico and Newman’s Own are the only pasta sauces that do not have hfcs or a ton of other sugars, thickeners, binders, bulkers or whatever. Those sauces usually go on sale at 2 for $5. The Prego sauce is packed full of everything you can’t pronounce and goes on sale at 4 for $5. When you are stretching your food budget to the limit you can’t afford to be too picky.
go look at bread ingredients sometime. compare them by price. The less you pay, the more ingredients you get. How ironic.
When people say it’s hard for poor people to eat healthy, they aren’t just referring to the price of fresh produce vs ramen noodles. It goes way beyond that. But hell, everything marketed at kids with a kick to parents (fruit snax made with real fruit juice!) are almost always something like 2% juice, 90% hfcs 8% binders.
I don’t know, i think it is time to take back our food in some way.