Just yesterday, my thirteen-year-old, who has been my Bellevue Farmer Market shopping partner since she was teeny-tiny, asked, “Can we buy some maraschino cherries?”
Ye olde Wikipedia maraschino cherry
Bad timing on her part. Not only was I driving, but I’d just that day read a book about the ingredients in our foods, in which was a section on those wretched “cherry cordial” candies, where you bite hopefully into a lump of chocolate, only to have it ooze out a tablespoon of cloying goo and a maraschino cherry. Ugh. Has anyone ever found that a pleasant surprise?
“Maraschino cherries are fake!” I cried. “They’re pumped full of sugar and dye!”
“But they taste good.” (This interchange is only a sample of why I now, with three teenagers in the house, consider myself an utter parenting failure and have set fire to any manuscripts of parenting books I was drafting.)
According to This is What You Just Put in Your Mouth, a compilation of columns with the same name from Wired Magazine, maraschino cherries are generally Michigan cherries pumped full of Red Dye #40 (petroleum-derived), sulfur dioxide (to prevent browning), and two types of corn syrup.
I: “I’ll buy real cherries.”
13YO: “But you never do!”
I: (Sputtering in the face of this outright lie) “I buy them when they’re in season!”
So you see, not only have I failed to impart a delight in fresh, whole foods, but somehow seasonality has totally escaped my children as well. Even though (apart from apples and pears brought out of cold storage) I never buy out-of-season fruit at the store. Alas.
In any case, if you’re still a hold-out for fresh, whole, seasonal food that isn’t highly processed, you may like indulging in Schadenfreude by reading this book.
Di Justo collects his fun, interesting findings and delivers them with humor. For example, who knew that it wasn't just your (disgusted) brain telling you wet dog food was stinky? Because dogs are scavengers and love the smell of freshly dead carrion, one of the "natural flavors" added to canned food is sort of “Death-y.” Or did you know that Beano's active ingredient breaks up the gas-inducing culprit raffinose into simpler galactose and sucrose molecules--you digest without the “music,” but you're getting about four extra grams of carbs for every hundred grams you eat.
If you’re a food reader, you may have already known that real cheesemakers wanted the canned stuff labeled as "embalmed cheese" because of its sodium phosphate (embalming fluid) component, but did you also know that locust bean gum was used by ancient Egyptians to keep those mummy wrappings nice and tight?
Some foods tend to be not as awful as I would’ve imagined. Take Slim Jim “meat sticks,” for example. Really just salami-like material. So, if salami doesn’t gross you out, neither will a Slim Jim. Nor was I dismayed by sugarless gum and the thought of chewing tree sap that also gets used in tires(!!!) because who cares? People have been doing it for thousands of years.
The author ventures outside the food aisles as well, into such mysteries as hair dye and Rain-X and fabric softener. The fabric softener was an eye-opener—the secret ingredient being animal fat, to give our laundry that soft, silky feeling. Mmmm…
All in all, the book made for a quick, fun read, and if you never pick it up, I’ll just leave you with this tip: if you’re scheduled for a cranial MRI, skip the mascara. That thing won’t know if you have luscious lashes anyhow, and the metal in your mascara can throw off the readings! Who knew?
