You guys who know me know I'm not a zealot,
right? I'm like the opposite of that. Live and let live. Variety is the spice.
To each his, well, you know.
But the more I embrace the idea behind "clean
eating," the more trouble I have with the way food comes to us. Economics
and science together have created a default in which compromised food is
cheaper, more available, and easier to store than whole food, and nowhere is
this more apparent than in grain products.
I won't get into boxed cereals and snack
foods, because, we all know they're loaded with sugar and preservatives, but
something I looked into the other day has me all riled up. As though I'm a
zealot! Which I'm not. I promise. Well, maybe I am. Here's the scoop:
Fresh bread, homemade bread, is amazing,
right? But if you don't eat it right away, it'll sprout mold. Within a
half-week, you'll need to toss it. Let's face facts, it's just not realistic for
today's busy household to make bread twice a week. So, what's the
next best thing?
Oh, and here's another fun thing that's been
okayed by the FDA. DATEM, otherwise known as Diacetyl Tartaric Acid Esters of
Monoglycerides. Yet another dough conditioner - this one helps bread look
prettier. More uniform. A 2002 study on rats showed DATEM to cause "heart muscle fibrosis and
adrenal overgrowth."
There are other nasty preservatives in bread, too. Here's a link to the full article from the blog of one of my most trusted sources,
Fooducate.
I had Carson read the article before breakfast this morning. "How about French Toast?" I said. I pulled out a loaf of his favorite store brand bread with a special sticker on the front claiming the bread was made using a baking process called "Tender Twist" - while also claiming to be made using whole grains. (the ingredients panel is shown below). I also offered him the one non-heel slice of Dave's Powerseed that we had left. It felt somewhat stale. He sniffed them as though he was a sommelier. 
"One of each," he said.
Once the bread was dipped in an egg-and-milk batter, sprinkled with cinnamon and drizzled with maple syrup (the real kind), and dotted with blueberries, he said he couldn't tell the difference taste-wise, and gobbled them both up. So I asked him if he would be willing to do without the azodicarbonamide-laden bread with the flour that had been taken apart and put back together again (that's what the term "enriched" means, btw), and he agreed to try it for a month. Looks like we'll be sampling our way through Dave's selection.
Baby steps, right?
Any label war stories out there? What lies bring out the zealot in you?
