The Sad State of Food

I was grocery shopping on Friday (as I often am) at Winco. While I was there I decided I would pick up some cheap peanut butter because my mother has left a ten pound bag of birdseed at my house that has been here since Christmas and she refuses to remove it. So I figure, heck, I will save some toilet paper rolls, buy some cheap peanut butter, and Freya and I will make bird feeders. Okay, so I am in the peanut butter area. I glance around looking for whatever is the cheapest. $2.45. Perfect! I usually spend about twice that much for peanut butter and three times as much for almond butter, which is our preference at my house.

Out of curiosity I check the ingredients. Roasted peanuts, sugar, fully hydrogenated vegetable oil (rapeseed, cottonseed, soybean) salt, molasses. Okay, to recap those - sugar - okay, added sugar is bad and it is something I avoid, especially in foods I am going to be feeding my daughter, but it is just sugar. Of course, there is no indication whether it is real cane sugar or genetically modified beet sugar but that is the subject of another post. Salt, yeah, molasses, okay, more sugar but whatever...

It is the oil people! That is the scary ingredient here! If you are consuming hydrogenated oils then stop! If you want to know why click here or here or here. Hydrogenated oils are trans fats, except the nutritional label says zero trans fats. Again, that is the subject of another post, but for now know this: companies can say that a product contains zero trans fats as long as there is less than half a gram per serving, so please read your labels!

Anyway, I am not here to rag on hydrogenated oil. What I am about to rag on is how the least expensive peanut butter contains it. The day after all of this happened I ran across a blog post by liberal talk show host, Bill Maher. Now, love him or hate him he has been telling us that the food we eat is killing us since I was a freshman in high school, at least that is when I started to remember hearing it. The blog was called "Food Racism" and you can read it here. Basically, it talks about how, in response to a food supply that was decreasing in quality, specialty markets for rich people cropped up. Organics, grass-fed meats, etc - all available if you have the dough (organic, of course!) Meanwhile, food for the vast majority of Americans keeps getting worse.

When I saw this I knew I had to write about it! The least expensive peanut butter has an ingredient in that is literally like one molecule away from plastic! Not only is this the cheapest available peanut butter, it is WIC approved! WIC is supposed to provide lower income families, and their children, with quality nutritious foods. I don't remember seeing trans fat on the "my pyramid" chart! Now, to be fair, WIC also authorizes you to buy the "natural" peanut butter, which was also available at Winco that day. This natural peanut butter was the kind with the oil on top. Now, maybe you don't like that, maybe your kids don't (oh how long it took to get Kyle to be okay with it), so you pass it up and purchase the peanut butter with the hydrogenated oils because you are using WIC, don't have a lot to spend,  are unemployed, on a fixed income, or you simply are trying to save a buck! It doesn't matter, it shouldn't be there!

Now, I completely agree that people should educate themselves, they should take the time to read labels and be aware of what they are putting in their bodies. Maybe if you weren't buying Starbucks or Rockstars or cigarettes you could afford the better peanut butter for your kids and yourself. This is all true; however, why is it there in the first place? Upon comparing the ingredients of this peanut butter to the peanut butter I had at home I noticed two things. The first, the only ingredient in my peanut butter was dry roasted peanuts and the second, mine requires refrigeration. Ah ha! The hydrogenated fat makes the peanut butter shelf stable after it has been opened.

I know this blog post contains no recipes and no practical tips on saving money. I will say this though, the peanut butter at Trader Joe's is tasty and doesn't contain anything weird, it has no added sugar, and maybe it is a a dollar more than the stuff I got at Winco on Friday. That is not really the point, the point is food discrimination. I have to go to Trader Joe's, Winco, farmer's market, S&S, plan what I will buy and every dollar I spend, and know ahead of time which brands are okay and which product are okay in order to purchase food that doesn't have chemicals in it. Because I operate on a modest food budget this takes a lot of time and effort and planning (at least sometimes), where if I was rich and money wasn't an object I could do a lot less planning and my shopping would take a lot less time, because honestly, if money was no object, I would just go to Holiday Market and the farmer's market and be done with it.

Peanut butter should be a simple food, a food you can feel good about as you make your kid a sandwich (at this point I am starting to feel guilty about giving it to the birds). It shouldn't be a poison laced with chemically processed oils that line your arteries and force your heart to work harder within minutes of consuming it. Not only that, it should be affordable for everyone. Nutrition, not simply calories, should be affordable for everyone. It doesn't matter if you are rolling in benny's, purchasing food using foodstamps, or using WIC, you deserve access to clean, safe, nutritious food.

What can you do? Well, consider every dollar you spend to be a vote. Don't purchase foods laced with chemicals. Second, write your congressman. Tell them to introduce legislation which ends subsidies to companies who produce food with chemicals and additives (part of the reason it is so cheap is because it is subsidized by the government). Tell them to provide subsidies to producers who produce quality, nutrient rich foods and to local farmers who provide wonderful, fresh food at farmer's market - this would make these types of foods more affordable and available to everyone. Here, if you reside in California's First District you can click here to email your congressman! And, since I know some wonderful people in California's Twelfth, you can click here. I may be going out on a limb here, but if you are not in either of those districts then click here and find your representative! I may be over estimating my readership a little...