Monday, September 15, 2008

Grocery Store Blues: The daily dance with salt and sugar continues

At lunchtime yesterday I poked my head into the fridge to see if anything would speak to me.

(“Hey, I’m that leftover soup from 6 days ago. Wanna live on the edge?”)

I noticed a bit of spaghetti sauce. Two days old.

Pasta it is, I said to myself.

I was starving so I bumped up the amount of sauce by adding more sauce, plus mushrooms, green pepper and onion.

I know there is sugar in Hunts Thick and Rich sauce (7 grams of glucose-fructose and/or refined sugar per 125 ml or 38 g per can), too much for my taste, so I like adding veggies to lower the ratio.

Once the pot of sauce was on the burner I grabbed PC spaghettini from a side cupboard.

I wondered if the directions still included one about adding salt to the water even though most Canadians know there is too much salt (and sugar) in just about everything we eat.


[Did you know? Windsor Salt now adds sugar to their boxes of salt. Sweet!]

Instruction 1 read (in part):

“Bring water to a boil. Add 15 ml of coarse salt.”

I said, fugettabouttit.

There’s way more than enough salt (and sugar) just in the sauce.

Way way more.

**

Is the salt shaker still on your kitchen counter or table? Does it need to be?

Do you like sugar in your salt?

.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I once came across hydrogenated vegetable oil listed on the ingredients for ground cinnamon! It's ridiculous eh?

G. Harrison said...

i had not heard of that one, jesse.

i wonder if cheaper and plentiful products are often used to bulk up the volume of more expensive items e.g the cinnamon?

for profit margins there is a reason to do so.

cheers,

gord h.

Mojo said...

Truth is, there's usually quite enough salt naturally occurring in most foods for my taste. But I will confess, there's something about grinding sea salt over a baked potato that I find extremely satisfying.

Does this mean you got your camera back? Or was this a stock shot from the GH Archive?

Mojo said...

Oh! I nearly forgot. My mother adds quarter-slices of zucchini and summer squash to her sauce for body. Makes a tasty and unique additive!

G. Harrison said...

hi mojo,

I may give sea salt a shake now and again. lovely taste.

no camera yet; it is being repaired as we speak (bad Sony chip resulted in a recall).

i have a second hard drive filled with photos and this week i'll try to transfer files. until then i am borrowing images from mr. google.

cheers,

gord h.

summer squash - love them. and one plant is growing out of my composter and across my small work deck.

My Year Without said...

I'm glad that someone else has figured out the mysterious salt/sugar mystery! Morton's salt has "dextrose" in its "pure salt" container. Food suppliers have to compete for the best flavor...and sugar makes everything taste better! (...remembering the time when i was little and poured 3 cups of sugar in mom's cornbread recipe...it was a big hit that night!)

I also had a rude awakening at a Red Robin (are they in Canada?) restaurant when I began salting my fries. I was inadvertently sugaring my fries, as well: http://myyearwithout.blogspot.com/2008/09/red-robin-and-little-known-sugar-fact.html

Like your writing!

G. Harrison said...

hi my year,

no Red Robins in Ontario as far as I know. In Canada?

I noticed a fine powder floating in a sunbeam and coming from the salt shaker as I salted my lunch several years ago.

I thought, it looks like powdered sugar.

Windsor salt boxes list 'invert sugar' under contents. The truth is out.

cheers,

gord h.