the darkerside to rants

I just took a nice little stroll down to my local grocery store (you gotta love 24 hour full fledged supermarkets) to pick up some cheese, why at midnight you ask? Because I felt like having a cheese sandwich.

Now I tend to be a bit picky about the things I stuff into my mouth, so I always read the labels and ingridients list (I just wish they had an E list like they do in Europe) and processed food I try to avoid wherever possible.

Pasteurized process cheese, for example, is made from one or more cheeses, such as cheddar or colby, and may have cream or anhydrous milkfat added. The cheese is blended and heated with an emulsifier—typically a sodium or potassium phosphate, tartrate, or citrate—and other optional ingredients such as water, salt, artificial color, and spices or other flavorings.

The cheese is then poured into molds to solidify and is later packaged. This processing produces a smooth, mild-tasting cheese that melts easily. For pasteurized process cheese, the final product can have a maximum moisture content of 43% and must have at least 47% milkfat. An interesting twist is that the product alternatively can be labeled as pasteurized process American cheese when made from cheddar, colby, cheese curd, granular cheese, or a combination of these; when other varieties of cheese are included, it must be called simply American cheese.

As they didnt’ seem to have any “real” cheese slices, only processed ones. So I started looking for some of the alternatives they were offering, in this case of course based on Soy. Soy seems to be one of the new trend foods lately, besides the “no carb stuff’ (more about this in another post).

So I started reading the lable on the soy cheese slices and to my surprise I realized that half of what was in there was actually coming from milk.

So here’s my question: Why even bother with it, if it in essence is still milk?

I guess it’s one of those great marketing ploys like Atkins.

Anyways, I bought a brick of Mozarella and will be slicing it myself now, put it on some 16-corn bread from my local bakery and quickly toast it to perfection.

As a side note, I just came across this little nugget on the Kraft Website where they tell the background stories of how many of their products came to pass. I am still not so sure I like processed food, but it is fascinating to see just how industrialized most of our food has become.