Daily Doses: Snacks

            Have you ever walked down an aisle of your favorite grocery store when something caught your eye? Perhaps it was a nice display of your favorite snacks, White Cheddar Cheez-Its in my case. The yummy, cheesy crunchy taste always gets to me. So you see your favorite snack beings advertised. Luckily the box is on sale for $2.50. So you buy it. When you buy it what do you expect you are getting? In my case it’s a box of delicious, white cheddar cheese crackers. But in reality, what are you really getting?

            I had to do some thorough research on this snack before I got all my facts straight. Cheez-Its are one of my favorite snacks. I could eat on a box all day long. I love them that much. When I think of Cheez-It cracks, I think of some type of wheat product, cooked with dairy products and other fresh ingredients to make the cracker. And then I think of the fresh cheese that must be freeze dried and ground to make the cheesy powder on the cracker. That was my initial idea of a Cheez-It cracker. Honestly, I never took the time to read the ingredients at the back of the box. I didn’t feel like I needed too. I didn’t even look at the calorie count. I just ate what I felt was the right amount, depending on how hungry I was…

            In reality, Cheez-It crackers have 21+ ingredients. When I read the serving size, it listed 27 crackers as the limit. I well went over that… Each serving has 8g of fat and 2g of saturated fat. It also contains 250mg of sodium. I’m not saying this is bad, considering a bag of Doritos has way more danger than this. All I am saying is that this snack should not replace my meals, which they can easily do. Snacks are often abused by overeating them, due to lack of proper knowledge on portion size and content. Snacks are often low nutritional and are intended to be eaten sparingly and in moderation. That is what most health doctors would tell you, but not the companies who make our favorite snacks… Mega companies such as Kelloggs and Frito-Lay will advertise their products in such a way to get you interested in buying them on a regular basis. The commercials often feature pretty looking people with nice figures eating a handful of the given snack. It’s made to looks so natural and delicious. Today, many of our food products are marketed this way.

            What do we really know about our food? And why does money play such a big role in production? Average hard working people usually tend to buy food they can afford. As the trend goes, people who are poor spend less money on food. This means they tend to buy cheaper products. Cheaper products mean foods that are low in nutritional value. Fresh meat, fruits and vegetables are considerably higher priced than what we consider junk food.  Mega companies tend to use cheap products when they market cheap products. Only makes sense right? The cheapest food stock in the USA is corn. Corn is used in almost every snack food, including soda and juices. Most sweetened products in the USA have high fructose corn syrup. Over time, the production of corn grew out of proportion. Major corporations realized they could take a great deal of advantage from this overstocked crop. They decided to use corn as oil, sweetener, grain, and even food stock for animals such as beef and chicken.

            The addition of corn wasn’t the only change in the way food is produced and presented. Our perception of food has also changed. Compare a generic hamburger from 1950 to a generic hamburger from 2010. Is there a difference? Yes there is. The difference is portion size. As time went on, people’s average portion size for food grew bigger. The correct standard portion of something in a meal is the size of your palm. Let’s use pasta for example. The way I eat pasta, I usually fill the whole plate up with it when I serve myself. In reality that’s about 5 times more pasta than a standard portion. Not to mention it’s lacking in nutritional value. Pasta alone is a carbohydrate; it has no vegetable value except for maybe some fiber. The meat sauce is only good for protein, and maybe some tomato value. A full nutritional meal contains foods from all groups correctly proportioned. Average people don’t always consider this.

            Apart from creating cheap foods is the way the food is handled. The food these days are not of high value when it comes to mass production. That is evident in the way food is farmed and packaged. Safety measures seemed to be bypassed through secret added ingredients. What I mean is, ingredients used to kill off bacteria and preserve food are at the forefront of options rather than taking the actual safety precautions of storing and handling food properly. An example of this is the way chicken is produced and packaged. Fresh, live chickens are forced to live in horrible conditions. To combat this, they are injected with anti-bacterial agents, rather than being changed to cleaner environments. When the chickens arrive at the factories to be packaged, they are sprayed down with chemicals, such as chlorine, to kill germs, which are caused by improper handling.  Despite the attempts to keep food uncontaminated, breakouts of bacteria such as ecoli and salmonella are prevalent. If we really knew all the facts surrounding our food’s origin, we would look at it completely differently. We would question how our money is being spent on food. After seeing the film “Food Inc.”, my perception of food has changed. I realize that buying healthier foods cost more, which increases the substantial value I place on food. Does healthy food have priority?  To me it does.