*waves fists at food industry*

[sparkindarkness]

I am not a big fan of the food industry, I has ranted before I have

Now normally we cook everything from as few processed beginnings as possible. But, of course, Beloved has done the shopping hasn’t he?

I’m not sure why we need 5 boxes of cereals since we don’t actually eat cereals. But there they are, in our cupboard now, probably being bullied by the biscuits.

Naturally we  discussed these cereals at length. In detail. But without heavy objects – so far. But one of Beloved’s defences was that they’re HEALTHY! Though he did try to hide the Kelloggs’ Honey Crunchy Nut Clusters when making such a bold claim. He waved the museli in my face – “healthy!” he yelled!

And indeed the box did mention all the lovely fibre and have lots of nice green labels with big words about healthy diets and all the usual advertising gumf. Sparky was not impressed and read the box:

Amount of Sugar in 100g of Honey Crunchy nut Clusters? 25g
Amount of Sugar in 100g of Museli? 24.9g (Though in the museli’s defence it had negligible salt, the Clusters had virtually a gram per bowl).

And y’know what? That pisses me of muchly. Because the powers that be are screaming at us about an obesity epidemic and all the grossly over the top warnings about how everyone is getting fatter and how very very very terrible that is *eye roll* and they lecture us – we need to be healthier! We need to eat better! We need to be slimmer and eat less fat and less sugar and less salt! OR THE WORLD WILL END!!!!

Well, y’know what? Here Beloved tried (kinda) to eat healthily. And no doubt thousands of people around the country are doing the same thing. They went out and bought a breakfast cereal that has all the taste and texture of the contents of a hoover bag  (our hoover does have a bag, yes. Because while we do have a Dysan with its silly ball, one trip falling down the stairs revealed that the REASON, Mr. Dysan, most vacuum cleaners don’t have a ball is because it’s bloody fragile) because they wanted to be healthy. I mean museli? That’s what it’s FOR, right? So they’re chewing their way through this sawdust, trying, really trying to do what the powers that be are lecturing us about – and failing. They may as well be eating a bowl of sickly, syrupy, nasty honey & nut crunchy nut clusters.

And yes, I am using the 100g readings because they’re nice and standard. Why? Because across the 5 boxes there seemed to be no consensus as to exactly how big a bowl would be. The Museli was fairly honest with a measure of 50g. Others passed off 25g as a serving. Uh-huh…

And this is what bugs me so much. Perhaps instead of lecturing the naughty naughty people about being so naughty in their naughty food choices, oh the naughtiness, the powers that be could take steps to make it so eating healthily (not necessarily the same as losing weight) wasn’t so damn HARD? Perhaps they could look at policing a product claiming to be healthy, perhaps ‘healthy’ food like yoghurts and museli should have to more clearly announce “hey, I’m full of sugar!” perhaps we shouldn’t let labels like “low fat” be used as a distraction from the huge sugar and salt content.

Perhaps, if we want people to eat healthily, we should poke to food industry into making that actually POSSIBLE. Or, better yet, easy.