whats in your food

Fri, Mar 28, 2008

I’m running short on freeze dried food for camping, having used Expedition Foods for a while and the even better Turmat on my ML assessment. I just love the porridge with strawberries. It’s hard to put into words the ecstatic feeling one gets from munching on a hot bag of porridge and strawberries on a cold, wet, high camp in the Cairngorms, after most of the previous night spent out on Beinn Macdui in a screaming gale and rainfest. Well worth the cost.

So I was interested when I got word of Wilderness Dining, which I got via Weird Darren’s blog, which he got via Dawn’s blog. Funny how the blogvine works! Anyway, I went to the site, had a rummage around with the dollar to pound exchange rate in the back of my mind (Jetboil stove for about 35 smackers! plus postage - prolly still cheaper than here) and I picked a food bag at random, 3 Bean Chili Soup. I like to read the ingredients to see what’s going down my thrapple, that’s why I’ll carry the relatively heavy Loyd Grossman soup when I’m going out for a night in the tent, as it’s really healthy compared to some of the instant stuff you get on the lower shelves, which is full of hydrogenated vegetable oil, which is a pretty nasty thing to ingest:

“…vegetable seeds are cleaned and bleached to remove all colour, taste, smells…”

Then the liquid has either nickel, palladium, platinum or rhodium added to it. Yum yum, don’t forget your daily intake of heavy metals! Palladium is actually bad for you, although I don’t suppose a stomach full of platinum would be much better. As if that’s not bad enough, hydrogen is bubbled through the concoction, giving it its name, hydrogenated vegetable heart attack. The heavy metals are apparently removed, perhaps by this process? Considering the amount of crap that’s in a packet soup, it’s amazing how cheap it is, compared to a Loyd Grossman soup, which has none of the above. I always thought platinum was very expensive, perhaps not, if you just want to eat it.

So back to 3 bean chili soup, mmm, just what’s needed on a cold camp evening, or is it? I noticed it contained hydrolized vegetable protein. I’d never heard of this but I had a pretty good idea what it might be, going by its hydro prefix, or so I thought. Who comes up with these ideas?

“…produced by boiling cereals or legumes … in hydrochloric acid and then neutralizing the solution with sodium hydroxide…”

Trying to imagine a TGOC conversation…

“Hey, that was a long day. Time for dinner. I’ve got a bag of corn here, how’re we gonna cook it?”

“I know, let’s boil it in hydrochloric acid. I’ve got some in the lead lined Nalgene bottle.”

“hey man, it’s getting outta control. It’s going to boil over and destroy the tent”

“pipe down dude. Just chuck that bag of sodium hydroxide on it…”

So no, I won’t be buying the 3 bean chili soup as the recipe seems to have come straight out of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.