Chemical Ice Cream Trucks

Now that we have small children, and it’s summer time, the Ice Cream Truck holds special significance in our lives. Especially the 3yo’s life.

Not only is it a TRUCK with BIG WHEELS, but it MAKES MUSIC, and it dispenses ICE CREAM! I mean, if you were a three year old boy obsessed with big-wheeled trucks and happen to like ice cream, come on. This is serious stuff!

That is, until mommy and daddy read a little article in the National Post about soft ice cream cones.

taken from http://www.nationalpost.com/life/story.html?id=680377

The article summarizes, with some description, the ingredients that are used for making soft cones in these trucks. And it’s not pretty, I tell you.

First of all, they pump air into the ice cream. 

Air? you say.

Yes, air. Apparently the content varies from cone to cone, but it can reach up to as much as 60%.

The remaining ingredients are not surprising.  Many, if not most, are reminiscent of ingredient lists on most mass produced candies and other processed foods. Like corn syrup, for example. No surprise there, since we eat corn with corn, according to Michael Pollan (read the Omnivore’s Dilemma or In Defense of Food).

Other ingredients include a whack of difficult to pronounce chemical names, like Mono- and Diglycerides, Calcium Sulfate, Cellulose Gum, Polysorbates 65 and 80, Carrageenan, Magnesium Hydroxide and a whole bunch of numbered ingredients that probably include things like food colour. Of course it also mentiones Artifical Flavours (whatever those are), Guar Gum, and Whey.

And here we thought ice cream was made with milk. Good, wholesome milk that is supposed to be vital for children.

You can read the original article here.

Related reading: I was once curious about the Valentine candy my son wanted to consume and analyzed a  Twizzler. I also found out what those 4-digit sticker codes on fruit really mean.

Sugar houdini

Definitions:

Houdini – Harry Houdini (1824-1926), magician, escapologist
Escapism - the attempt to divert attention from an unpleasant reality 
PPMS – Permanent Pre Menstrual Syndrome (first came across this phenomenon here)

I recently came across an article in a magazine that talks about sugar. The gist: we eat too much, there is too much hidden sugar in our food, and it’s bad for you.

Being Swiss, and more importantly, female, and most importantly a mom of tiny tots, I like sugar. Particularly the type found in chocolate. I have rambled about this here and here and I will likely again soon, I think.

There is a reason why I included definitions at the top of this post. Houdini and escapism are related to one another, as far as the magician Harry Houdini is concerned, but the term kind of leaped into my brain when I thought of a funky title for this post. Because it seems to me that sugar, in its white, refined, granlulated form, has this houdini-like quality to it. Don’t you think? I mean, there is sugar everywhere you look, even if it’s not the white granular stuff (think simple carbs, for example).

The reason I mentioned PPMS up there is because I am just coming out of that state. There was something REALLY wrong with me over the last few weeks because I was unable to stop eating chocolate. I mean, I usually have a little every day, but last week I thought I was going to go into some kind of insulin-resistant shock from all the chocolate I consumed. Disgusting, really. But then, on Saturday morning, I realized that last week I was experiencing PMS (or P-PMS, because it went on and on and on), which, 4 months postpartum, SEEMS a bit early to me, and I forgave myself all this sugar consuming. I mean, I couldn’t HELP myself. But now, I’m feeling better. The cravings have mostly disappeared. Actually, my cravings went houdini on me too because I now crave salt. Like, olives. Or pickles.

But I digress. Back to the sugar.

Frankly, I think there is something wrong with all this promotion to reading labels, counting calories or points, weighing food or measuring inches. I find it, well, unnatural really. If you must diet, then why not just eat food?

And there you have it. Food. Michael Pollan says to “eat food, not too much, mostly plants”. He is the author of In Defense of Food and he talks about this stuff in plain lingo. He makes a very important distinction, comparing at length whole food with processed, packaged food. Go borrow the book at the library, or buy it at the bookstore. You won’t be sorry.

But this is not a book review post. So I won’t rehash all his points here. What I will do here is list the synonyms for sugar. Just so you can get an idea how the clever marketing people, and food scientists for that matter, manage to hide sugar in our processed, packaged food.

barley malt
beet sugar
brown sugar
buttered syrup
cane-juice crystals
cane sugar
caramel
carob syrup
corn syrup
corn-syrup solids
date sugar
dextran
dextrose
diastase
diastatic malt
ethyl maltol
evaporated cane juice
fructose
fruit juice
fruit-juice concentrate
glucose
glucose solids
golden sugar
golden syrup
grape sugar
high-fructose corn syrup
honey
invert sugar
lactose
malt syrup
maltodextrin
maltose
mannitol
molasses
raw sugar
refiner’s syrup
sorbitol
sorghum syrup
sucrose
turbinado sugar
yellow sugar

This list is far from exhaustive, but it sure gives new meaning to sugar.

Related - Candy Crap