08/20/2015
INGREDIENTS
During her winter school break last year, my daughter took the family car on a trip down south. Of course I loaded her up with my Four Seed Cookies to eat on the way. But, shortly after she came back, I noticed a half eaten box of Little Debbie’s Creme Filled Oatmeal Cookies on the kitchen counter. I tried one of course and it was pretty disgusting. When I noticed that someone else in the house was eating them too, I trashed them.
There are 166 words in the ingredient list on the Little Debbie box, many of them five syllables or more and meaningless to me. My favorite is the abbreviation tbhq; it means tert-butylhydroquinone and like many of my favorite foods it increases tumors in rats. In contrast, our Four Seed Cookies’ ingredients list uses 25 words so I’m feeling pretty pious.
At about the same time as our Little Debbie home invasion, I was confronted with a decision to either change my bread labels - which in some cases say “organic” in the title line - or pay for organic certification. Little Debbie convinced me that the real battle is not with certification and the fine points of labeling but with the social pressures against eating well. Paying for organic certification won’t make my breads any more healthy. In fact my four seed cookies only have one organic ingredient - that’s why they’re so cheap - but lots of seeds and oats.
So we’ll continue to use organic ingredients when doing so doesn’t make the product too expensive. But more to the point we’ll continue to find ways to use more whole grains in appetizing ways. Case in point, my daughter now asks for our Peanut Butter Oat Cookies (fresh ground peanut butter, organic oats, not too sweet) when she’s leaving on a trip.