Snack food industry should do better

The snack food industry isn’t evil in and of itself. Although many people think that all packaging should include health warnings, or at least a boldly placed label claiming everything is fine in moderation. The industry is not interested in healthy snacks, they are just interested in making us feel pleasure, if only for a short while.

In the movie The Sweetest Thing, one of the characters opens a bag of potato chips made of the synthetic fat substitute Olestra, and digs in. Then he notices that the package says something about anal leakage. “What kind of marketing brainiac puts anal leakage on his product?”, he wonders, as he spits everything out. Well, the brainiac in question here is the American snack food industry.

Notice that we are talking about the American snack food industry as opposed to the British or the Canadian ones. Because Olestra products are banned over there. If you eat anything with Olestra in it (Procter & Gamble since they’ve sold millions servings of stuff with Olestra and it) you could count yourself lucky if you got anal leakage. That’s the least of it.

The snackfood industry doesn’t stop there, of course. Not by a long shot. How about recombinant bovine growth hormone that they inject into cows to make them produce 15% more milk? This stuff apparently doesn’t just stay in the cow. That’s no problem as far as American ice cream makers are concerned.

It shows up in American ice cream. Once your kids eat that ice cream, it is believed that cancer could be one of the results. Of course, Canada and Britain aren’t crazy to put their kids on the stuff. That’s the kind of thing the American snack food industry does.

In the Far East, fried insects happen to be a popular street food – kind of the way fish and chips are sold here. You’re probably shrinking back in disgust and making a mental note never to travel to the Far East. You don’t have to go there to gorge on scary, multiple-legged creatures. Know how they make the food colors that are red shades used in juices, candy, ice cream and anything else?

You bet. They get them by grinding up beetles. No, they don’t list beetles on the ingredients list by that name. They call it cochineal extract or carminic acid. That’s the stuff. They import millions of pounds of this beetle extract from South America. South America is the world center for this kind of red food dye.

When they print an expiration date on a packaged snack food, about half the time, that expiration date does actually mean something. The rest of the time though, it doesn’t mean anything at all. But some really artificial foods like Twinkies (and lots of other stuff) could practically last to an eternity. But they still put an expiration date on there. Because then, the stores want to sell them quickly and try hard to do so. It’s amazing how much easier it is to just prepare some easy healthy snacks instead.