I'm a food renegade

This post is submitted to Food Renegade’s Fight Back Fridays.  Check it out for more great posts on the subject of real food.

Allow me to step away from my usual posts with recipes, techniques, or ingredients.  I’ve had a busy few evenings and haven’t had time to post about the lovely rhubarb buckle I made, or how I cooked my morels and fiddleheads.  I’ll try and touch on those things in upcoming posts.  But for now, this article from the New York Times caught my eye and I wanted to share it with you and share some thoughts on the topic of food safety and packaged/processed foods.

Food Companies Are Placing the Onus for Safety on Consumers

The article proposes a few solutions for making our food safer, such as “ingredient passports.”  It all seems so silly.  There has to be a better way.  Good thing there already is.

Read the rest of this entry »

The types of sweeteners you will find in my house - none artificial

I don’t eat Sweet and Low, Equal, or Splenda. I don’t believe they are food. They are chemicals that are masqueraded as food. Geared towards those who want to have their cake and eat it too, these artificial sweeteners supposedly provide all the sweetness of sugar without the side effects of calories. Eat yummy food and keep your waist trim!

Well, my first thought is that they taste awful. Even Splenda, which has marketing materials talking about how much it tastes like sugar, tastes awful to me. I can taste them in anything. Gross.

Secondly, maybe we shouldn’t be eating empty calories (like that which is found in refined sugar and to a lesser degree all the other natural, minimally processed sugars – honey, maple syrup, etc) to such excess that it causes weight gain. Maybe it should remind us that sugar is a treat, something to be used in small amounts and/or infrequently. I bake with sugar and eat it, but I try to use unrefined sugars when I can, and I also try not to bake sweets every week or eat them every day. In fact, I find the less sweets I eat, the less sweets I want to eat!

With all of this already in mind, today I checked out The People’s Chemist and learned some truly awful things about Splenda.

From the article:

Splenda contains the drug sucralose. This chemical is 600 times sweeter than sugar. To make sucralose, chlorine is used. Chlorine has a split personality. It can be harmless or it can be life threatening.

Guess what one Splenda is? It was discovered when its creators were trying to design a new pesticide, so that should tell you something. Go read the rest of the article to get the full scoop.