Musings on a Saltine
My oldest daughter is staying home from school for the third day in a row. Four of us contracted strep last week. The two-year-old and I got the fever and sore throat, the four-year-old broke out in pustules, and the six-year-old skipped the sore throat and got stuck with a fever and vomiting. She has improved gradually, but I don’t want to send her to school until she can eat an ordinary meal, so she is home again today.
With all this sickness, we compounded last week’s slow-food sins by buying the standard sick kid foods: Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and saltines. Bland, easy on the stomach and predictable. Just what a kid needs.
Saltines sound like a simple food, but like most baked grain products in grocery stores, they are a carefully calibrated mixture of processed and chemical foods. Only one of the brands available in my grocery store is made without high-fructose corn syrup, and it also contains TBHQ as a preservative.
Baked goods in the grocery store use chemical non-food ingredients to achieve two things: uniformity of texture and preservation of “freshness”. Our palates have grown accustomed to these things. The imperfections that are a prized part of handmade crafts have not gained mass appeal when it comes to food: we want everything precisely the same size, same color, no lumps, no bubbles, no variations. A skilled baker can approach these standards of reliability, but the perfect uniformity that the average American palate desires is a false expectation created through the use of chemicals.
Some of you have mentioned that you wish you could try our experiment, but the idea of it is too overwhelming. I am not urging you to do anything. This is an experiment for us, not a proselytizing conviction. But if you don’t already, you can seriously cut down on the non-food items you eat through abstaining from grocery store baked goods. Look for a good independent bakery in your area (not everywhere has good bakeries, I know. I am blessed to live in the land of Shadeau Breads), and buy your bread or muffins or rolls from them. Even crackers, if they offer them.
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So sorry everyone is sick! We started making our own bread about a year and a half ago- my husband misses Costco’s potato bread for sandwiches, but I couldn’t ever go back now. Fresh bread tastes too good! (And bakery cookies….pah, no comparison :) I haven’t tried making crackers yet- we don’t buy them, and I kind of miss them!
Sorry you’re all so sick. I hope everyone gets better soon!
It’s interesting that some people are telling you they wish they could do your experiment. Why are we as humans always so all or nothing? To me that sounds like they want to do exactly what you are trying to do or not do anything at all.
I’ve been trying to go for a more “slow food” route for years. It takes baby steps and work and nobody is perfect. I still use some canned foods but I try to use canned food that are as close to whole food as I can (e.g. organic canned tomatoes with little else in the ingredients, organic canned beans with as few ingredients as possible). When I use these convenience items, I don’t season with extra salt because I know it’s been done for me.
The important thing for people to understand is the fact that cooking from scratch is a way to take care of their health. They need to educate themselves as much as they can about nutrition and try to eat whole foods, including as many plant foods as possible. Cook as close to scratch as possible to control salt, sugar and the quality of fats in the food we eat.
If a person has to eat processed food or eat out due to illness, convenience or just because they want to, making sure it is the smaller percentage of their food budget is what is important. Nobody is perfect.
Do you know about Blue Oven Bakery? Shadeau is good, but Blue Oven tops even it by a mile. Not available in supermarkets, though. Findlay Market and Northside. Just an FYI.
I’m sorry all of you guys are getting sick – NO FUN! One thing you wish the family wouldn’t share all around huh?
I’m headed down the road to making my own bread. In the meantime, I have switched from the cheapest bread to a bread with ingredients that I actually recognize and I could never go back to that bland, blah cheapy stuff again. It’s amazing that I even liked that junk in the first place!
I made homemade crackers for a party (I adapted a recipe from glutenfreegoddess.blogspot.com), and they were a HUGE hit.
Being gluten-free and other-allergen-free, sometimes I miss a simple bowl of Campbell’s when I don’t feel good. But even the organic chicken-and-rice soups don’t taste good to me since I’ve gotten used to mostly ‘more real’ food. What I do love when I’m sick is takeout Tom Kha soup from one of the local Thai restaurants. It’s the ultimate comfort food.