Keep It Simple, Sweetie

After seeing Food Inc. and reading a couple Michael Pollan books, I jumped on the bandwagon and began making a greater effort to eat organic and locally-produced food when possible. But the funny thing is that, despite these efforts, I hadn't been paying much attention to food labels. I mean, I knew that homecooked meals usually are better for you than buying packaged convenience food or eating out. But I still wasn't paying very close attention to ingredient lists.

A couple weeks ago, the Wrangler picked up a bag of store-bought bread and read aloud the ingredient list:

enriched bleached flour, water, skim milk, high fructose corn syrup, vegetable oil, yeast, salt, wheat gluten, corn starch, mono- and diglycerides, ethoxylated mono- and diglycerides, sodium and calcium stearoyl-2-lactylate, datem, calcium peroxide, ascorbic acid, azodicarbonamide, enzymes, yellow corn flour, natural flavor, paprika extract, calcium propionate, monocalcium phosphate, calcium sulfate, ammonium sulfate, calcium carbonate, ammonium chloride, distilled vinegar, soy lecithin, soy flour

That is the actual ingredient list for the store-bought bread! In stark contrast, let me list the ingredients in my homemade bread:

organic unbleached flour, water, yeast, kosher salt

Yep, that's it. And, as I've written before, the artisan bread recipe I use allows me to bake a fresh loaf each day in about an hour. (And only five minutes of that hour is "active" prep--the rest of the time the dough is rising or baking.) I don't need high fructose corn syrup, corn starch, vinegar, paprika extract, and at least 15 unpronounceable chemicals in my bread, so I'm going to pay attention to labels and no longer buy bread with this kind of stuff in it.

Similarly, I've been making homemade ice cream lately instead of buying it. My recipe has three ingredients: organic half-and-half, sugar, and pure vanilla extract. Sure, my ice cream tastes a lot better than store-bought ice cream, but I'd never noticed that a premium brand's "homemade vanilla" contains: milk, cream, sugar, corn syrup, egg yolks, natural flavor, guar gum, salt, carob bean gum, annato. What the heck is annato, why are there two kinds of gum on this list, and what is corn syrup doing in my ice cream?

Feeling like we were onto something, the Wrangler and I read the labels on our canned goods. What you've heard about the ubiquitousness of corn syrup is true! I suppose that whether it's really bad for you is debatable, but I don't see why it's in everything--even canned tomatoes.

Chalk up two points for this cowgirl tonight. I have a batch of my freshly mixed bread dough in the fridge, and the Wrangler and I have just helped ourselves to two heaping bowls of homemade ice cream. (Clearly, simpler food is not necessarily synonymous with diet food.)