But that was then.
In the past few months I have, for the first time, really started to think about food as something more than future shit. And I've started to look at the products in the grocery store for more than a vague combination of value / price and perceived quality / branding. To wit: I've been looking for a better bread.
I'd been eating Healthy Life bread. For three reasons: (1) it had no high fructose corn syrup, and I knew that that was bad shit, (2) it wasn't expensive & (3) that's what X-2 had bought, and even post-divorce trauma I trusted her judgment. (And no, I am not going to touch that line.)
But as I began to come to grips with the idea that the reason I was not losing weight was not because of a lack of exercise (I'd been biking thirty or forty miles a week but didn't really have a hell of a lot to show for it), but because of my shitty eating habits, I began to look at that stuff a bit. And this led to that led to the other, and so I learned that while Healthy Choice was not terrible shit, it was most certainly not GOOD shit, either. The Vital Statistics 1: per slice, you get 65 calories, 15 of them from fat, 250 mg of sodium, 25 g of carbohydrates, 3 g of fiber, 4 g of added sugars, 4 g of sugar. I poked around the internet and found some accolade for Roman Meal Bread, so I gave that a try. And the Roman Meal numbers were: 70, 10, 110, 12, 1, 2, 2. So for an extra five calories you got better bread in all categories except for the fiber, where you kind of lost out big time. But at that time I hadn't made the turn into FiberLand, so it didn't bother me. I liked the way the bread tasted. And I liked the name and the logo image. ROMAN Bread, man.
But I kept poking around, because even though I thought that I had moved up on the Food Chain with Roman Meal Bread, Fooducate only gave it a grade of B , and I am not a B-Man. (Healthy Life was a B- , though, so at least I'd made a better choice than X-2 had, which made me happy, of course. You know how that shit goes, right?)
And my searches kept leading me to Ezekiel Bread. Sprouted Grain Variety. (I had no idea what a sprouted grain was, but I had to admit that it did sound SEXy.) But that shit was seriously expensive, and I didn't really trust bread that you had to keep refrigerated. So I kept looking.
And then Trader Joe's happened, and I saw a thing called Trader Joe's Sprouted 7 Grain Bread. And it was pricey ($3.49 for a loaf that wasn't yuge), but (1) it wasn't as pricey as Ezekiel Bread, (2) I was groovin' on the Trader Joe thang, and (3) there are a lot of pretty girls shopping at Trader Joe's. So I got it. And when I got home and had my first taste of it . . . . Oh.
Oh, my.
That was some good fuckin' bread, man.
Kind of reminded me of the "soda bread" I'd had in Ireland. It had substance, y'know? It felt good against my teeth. And it had an A- from Fooducate . . . which was the highest grade that any bread got. (Doesn't seem fair, really, but hey, they get to make the rules.) And it was labeled as a Top Product . And the numbers? Well: 60, 15, 130, 7, 3, 0, 0. So as many calories from fat as the Healthy Choice, which was 5 more than the Roman Meal, and 20 more mg of sodium than the Roman Meal, but a hell of a lot less than Healthy Choice . . . and the same amount of fiber as the Healthy Choice, but not only no added sugar, no sugar at all. Oh, my.
I gave some to the kids. They are not what you would call Easy to Please Eaters. They ate it.
Now we are buying Trader Joe's Sprouted 7 Grain Bread. And we are happy.
What do we do now, now that we are happy?
I made all parts of this holy ghostly image of Trader Joe Bread myself. It is copyright by me, myself, and I. No bread was harmed in the making of this image.
1 Courtesy of fooducate.com, which has become a go-to source for me of late.
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