image courtesy Brown Eyed Baker
This morning I awoke to a reporter talking about a Walmart Ice Cream Sandwich that didn’t melt at 80F. This helped me to become more alert at about 5:30 and, considering I had just heard another report a few days ago about hot dog rolls which didn’t become moldy – almost ever, and therefore must be somewhere on the spectrum of inert foodstuffs, I immediately got to thinking about what big food “manufacturers” must be, on an unmonitored basis, putting into our food supply. A little while later I read an article by Ruth Reichl about how the FDA is continuing to allow antibiotics into feed supply for cows and other animals.
Of course this is all in addition to my ongoing obsession with pesticide use, the broad scale killing of bees and other pollinators, and the allowance of other chemical additives into our food supply.
My first instinct was to recommend making your own ice cream sandwiches. This seemed practical, if not desirable enough in my early, not so lucid hours of waking time. We’ll get to this later.
Then I got to wondering about the overall logic of the obsession with labeling – re GMOs, ingredient, nutrient and calorie listings being all the rage lately. The question formed in my mind, ” does it behoove us to have uber-accurate labeling on our food (cosmetics, health and beauty aids, toothpaste, laundry detergent and paper products, etc., etc.) where the goal is to have us be firmly in the “buyer beware” category, when really it may make much more sense to expend the current effort and dollars associated with getting all this labeling accurate and understandable in a different direction – to get all of this terrible stuff (chemicals, additives, stabilizers, artificial flavors, sweeteners, colors, hormones and pesticide residues just to cover a few) out of our food supply and sundry items?” Wouldn’t this make a lot more sense? I mean I certainly agree with being an educated consumer, but I just don’t get why, the market and the government allow this to go on in this day and age. Perhaps, the collateral damage of “additives” in all categories and their downstream “costs” are much more detrimental to our health and well being, and therefore labeling isn’t the issue here – it’s really allowable content.
It would seem that chemists can concoct just about anything you can think of to “stabilize”, “enhance” and extend the shelf life of every product in the universe. Last week I was listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson, a brilliant and wonderful man (of Cosmos fame, among many other things) discuss why the ability to conceive and explore the most abstract and far-fetched of ideas ultimately benefits us in multitudes of ways – but perhaps in this case, this ability takes us to a poor result. Honestly, should food producers be able to market inert food?
When today, if you look around you can see all of the arguments and controversy surrounding the healthy ingestation of even the most basic of “whole foods”, fish,meat, seafood, dairy, sugar, grain, being the 6 groups under most fire these days, and all for legitimate reasons, sometimes I think the assumption is that we are already beyond the elimination point of all the other “terribles” in the food chain.
Question #1 is, when we run all over creation thinking we are saving money by buying bargain brands or items in big box stores and store brands, not to mention the pantry staples we’ve consumed since childhood, do we really know what we are eating and if we save a nickel, do we pay in other, much more toxic ways?
Question #2 is, what in the heck is the government really doing here? Is there a sound, consistent and reasonable strategy and focus in the FDA, EPA and Department of Agriculture and Commerce? Can we feel it is a reasonable goal to worry about the amount of mercury in a fresh caught fish when we are pouring the likes of Coffeemate or Splenda into our coffee each morning and feeding our kids inert ice cream sandwiches and hot dog rolls? Of course I know that a lot of us would never touch Coffeemate, inert ice cream sandwiches or inert hot dog rolls, but you get my point. My guess is that if we all went through our pantries we’d come out with a huge pile of items which contain questionable, if not potentially poisonous ingredients.
Last year I attempted to get in touch with the EPA to find out what was going on with the neonicotinoid class of pesticides and the bee issue. I spent a considerable amount of time and I swore their modus operandi was to frustrate the heck out of anyone inquiring so they would just go away. The people I actually did speak with seemed to be purposefully evasive, and unhelpful, almost sounding as if they didn’t even have any idea what I was asking about. I would have to sadly assume that if I tried to talk to the powers that be in the FDA, Department of Agriculture and Commerce, that I would get a similar response.
What is left to do? Clearly the easiest and most expedient thing any individual can do is to not buy any processed foods and make everything from scratch with ingredients, organic whenever possible, in their own home. Knowing that most of us can not hold ourselves to this standard every day, well then we have to be the guardians of what goes into our grocery baskets and our mouths. And, I can tell you that after these last few reports, I am going to be a lot more careful when I’m selecting items I need to buy on a ready-made basis.
So, in this spirit, I am proposing the making of one’s own ice cream sandwiches (and hot dog rolls – should any of you be willing to admit to being a consumer of hot dogs or tofu sausages is maybe a better example)! This will surely get Walmart’s notice, now won’t it? LOL While making a dent in the food, chemical and pharma lobbies in this country sure seems all but impossible to me, I guess we can speak, most fundamentally, with our dollars every day. (Incidentally, I still have never forgiven Unilever for ruining Pears Soap either – in their quest to lower costs and ruin what was once a most wonderful and pure product, but I digress).
Well, anyway, making one’s own ice cream sandwiches doesn’t really take that much time and you can easily get your little kiddies involved in the process. Making home made ice cream in Summer is a great thing to do and making your own cookies to be the “outsides” is easy and fun. You can go crazy with variations of ice cream and cookies and adornments, of course. I’m going to go dig up my entries into a contest from last year – they were pretty good!
If I were doing this today (and I might), this would be my first stab out of the box (haha NO BOX) – but I’d have to say I’d run back over to Whole Foods and get more of those beautiful organic strawberries they have on sale for $3.99 and make strawberry ice cream – my all-time childhood favorite together with fresh peach!
beautiful and luscious organic strawberries from Whole Foods – yesterday they were $3.99 – best I’ve ever seen not fresh-picked on a farm
Use these:
David Lebovitz’s Vanilla Ice Cream (from The Perfect Scoop) : http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2009/02/vanilla-ice-cream/
Classic chocolate cookies for the outside: use the cookie recipe herein: http://www.browneyedbaker.com/2012/05/31/old-fashioned-ice-cream-sandwiches/
Have fun and always remember “Buyer Beware”…………..