It has probably been a couple of decades since I made my own ice cream.
Cuz I’m like this, I calculated the cost and compared the ingredients, finding the Breyers listed the same ingredients and beat the price of my raw materials alone.
Considering the significant time commitment in buying fresh ingredients, cranking the ice cream and clean-up, I have been buying from Breyers ever since.
Somewhere around the time I grew up (I was 27), I began to concern myself more with what I and my family were ingesting. Ingredient reading has been with me ever since.
This semi-literate method of food selection removes well over half the normal grocery store products from consideration. We feel better about what we are eating and probably are quite a bit healthier than we would otherwise be.
Unfortunately, the big processing and distribution industries couldn’t leave the tiny ingredient-reading slice of the market alone. I don’t know what we represent, but surely less than 10% of the market – probably something in the order of one or two percent total. But Holland-based Unilever, who took Breyers over from Kraft, has been allowed to retain the words “All Natural” on their packaging while the contents are anything but. Of course the ex-Monsanto, now USDA food tsar, assures us that GMO is perfectly safe. Thanks anyway, but I’ll pass.
I had been ignoring the package shrinking, assumed they used chemically-extracted beet sugar, and tolerated their fluffing the ice cream up to sell more air and less food, but discovering non-food toxins listed as if they were food tears our relationship asunder.
Monsanto employees won’t allow GMO in their cafeteria, but the criminals at the top in the FDA will permit it in your food and mine without blinking. While Californians were, according to pre-election polls, widely in favor of GMO labeling which gave me hope those labels would show up in Idaho, their electronic vote counts soundly defeated that ballot initiative.
Now we have to watch even closer. Those who want our business will continue to thoroughly label their processed food with “non-GMO”, “non-BST” and such. The phrase “All Natural” is has become a close relative to “Honest Politician”.
