As someone with a lot of dietary conditions and digestive problems, I have to be pretty careful anymore about things I eat and drink. The problem though is so many food products make decisions for people based on how the company thinks something should taste. For people like me, those decisions can be just annoying or they can be dangerous.
Take something simple: ginger tea. I like to get ginger tea to help with digestion. But the thing is, most of the "ginger" tea you can get from your local supermarket is not really ginger tea because some company decided you don't really want ginger tea that tastes like ginger. No, we have to cut it with "sweet orange oil" (Walmart "organic" ginger tea) or with lemongrass, licorice root, peppermint, and a few other things (Yogi "Ginger" tea). So what you get is bland to sweet with absolutely no ginger taste. I got some organic ginger from Amazon Vine that was 100% ginger and I could definitely taste the difference between it and the crap in the supermarkets.
Similarly companies that make breakfast sandwiches or burritos will decide that turkey sausage needs to be spicier than pork/beef sausage. Why? I guess they figure it won't have enough "flavor" otherwise. Just like if you buy canned peas, a lot of brands will add sugar because "sweet peas" have to be sweet, right? I bought a chicken patty TV dinner that didn't say it was spicy but when I bit into one of the patties it was a little spicy.
The thing is, these decisions are basically irreversible. I mean, I can't really unsweeten the ginger tea if you put sweet orange oil in it. I can't extract the lemongrass and whatever else if you mix it up with the ginger. I can't make the turkey sausage or chicken patty un-spicy after you make it spicy. I can't filter out the sugar you add to sweet peas.
By contrast, if I wanted my ginger tea to have less ginger kick, I could easily add sweetener or mix it with another tea. If I wanted my turkey sausage sandwich to be spicy, I can just add some sriracha or salsa or some damned thing. If I want my peas sweet, I can add my own sugar.
The problem with this food fascism is if I have diabetes, I don't want peas with sugar. I really don't want tea with sweet orange oil either. If I have acid reflux problems, I don't want some company unilaterally deciding to make turkey sausage spicy. At best that's annoying and at worst it can give me serious problems.
Then you get things like where a frozen pizza will be fine until some fascists decide they need to make the sauce "zesty" and add a bunch of spices. Or where they just blatantly lie and call their coffee creamer "sugar free" by replacing sugar with a bunch of corn syrup--which is worse for diabetics than sugar.
Really, I'm an adult; I should be able to make decisions for myself whether something is spicy or sweet. Some company shouldn't be dictating to me that ginger tea can't taste like ginger or peas can't taste like peas.
And the problem is sometimes you can't really tell how spicy something might be just from reading a label. Or there's just so much added crap that you might not even notice some spicy ingredient. Or it might be something generic like "added spices" or something. One brand of turkey sausage might have virtually the same "ingredients" and taste spicier than another.
It's the same when ordering fast food. One pizza place's wings might not be spicy at all if you get them "naked" or they might still have some residual spice. The same for chicken tenders where some plain ones might still be a little spicy. Or also for chicken patties in sandwiches. There's no real indication of how spicy it is and a little can still be enough to create problems because some company decided to add more "flavor" to the recipe.
(As an aside I've always thought spiciness is the laziest way to add "flavor." It's really easy to just throw some hot peppers or sriracha or something in there and make something spicy. And then it usually overpowers anything else, so really who needs any actual flavors? Just make it hot and people won't notice anything else. Yawn.)
You can virtue signal by saying, "I make all my food myself." Hey, awesome. But I don't always have time (especially in the morning) to make everything from scratch. So it'd be nice if I could trust that prepackaged foods aren't going to be unnecessarily sweet or spicy. Isn't there enough to worry about already?
Anyway, what food fascism have you noticed?
1 comment:
I think this food fascism is just based on what people will buy. Maybe 100% ginger tea wasn't selling well, so they decided to alter it, but wanted to keep the name "ginger" which is deceptive labeling.
One thing I remember is that awhile back avoiding gluten became a thing. Even if you could eat gluten no problem, some were saying it still wasn't good for you. So some companies started putting "gluten free" on the package of their product. This included meat, ice cream, and vegetables. Food that doesn't even have grain in it of any kind. I thought it was so lame. "Oh goodie, the eggs are gluten free."
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