I’m always telling folk that you can find all the awful stuff at a health food store that you find at your friendly neighborhood grocery – it just won’t kill you nearly as fast.
Potato chips, more-or-less doritos, candy bars and cookies and cereals. It’s all there. Just with a lot less sugar, no transfats, and missing those three lines of unintelligible ingredients, most of which turn out to be made from petroleum or plastic. But tasting just as awful, so the kids likely won’t be able to tell the difference.
Shopping at Trader Joe’s last week, familiar with all this junk, I found a product that surprised even me!
Trader Joe’s dark chocolate Edamame. I did a double take, and then had to buy them. Most foodies now know edamame. Plain old soy beans, healthy as all get out. A great snack or appetizer, and great to add to recipes. They used to be sold in their pods, so you could cook them and use your teeth to remove them from that hairy covering. Then they started being sold out of their pods and frozen in plastic bags, making cooking and eating easier. (Why is that a goal always?)
Now, here they are, cooked, dried – and then dipped in chocolate! And packaged in not-easily-recyclable No. 7 plastic. But they’re still more or less health food. At least they’re missing those three lines of additives, preservatives and food dyes.
They’re good – not great. A nice crunch. Not high in sodium – a plus. Could do with less sugar. Maybe a decent way to get your chocolate fix while getting some good stuff.
But really – what kind of unhealthy culture would even invent this stuff? Amazing!