Cheese?
So, I had a little "ice cream" on Friday. It was tasty, but it wasn't really ice cream, per se.
After work I headed over to the Albertson's grocery store. It isn't the one I usually go to, but it is more on the way home from work than the one I normally go to. I had a number of things to pick up, mainly milk. One thing I decided to get was some American cheese slices. I like to make grilled cheese (or toasted cheese if you're from NY) sandwiches with cream of tomato soup for lunch. I reached straight for the generic brand, but my hand was stayed by the label on the package. It read something like "Pastuerized Cheese Food Product". Yikes, that sounds even better than "Artificially Flavored Vanilla Ice Cream Dipped In Milk Chocolate Flavored Coating". I might as well be squirting Easy Cheese on my sandwiches.
Well, I wasn't to be taken in by that. I would go for the more expensive Kraft Singles, that proport to have a glass of milk in every slice. But lo! What is this on the package? "Pasteurized Process Cheese Food". That doesn't sound all that healthy at all. I should have moved over to the real cheese aisle at that very moment, but my fondness and determination for grilled cheese the way I had always had them won over me.
Since the "good" Kraft singles didn't seem to be any better than the crappy generic slices, I decided to go in between and get the Albertson's generic slices. Those are a step above the other generic.
Something I was just reading about today though is making me wonder even more. Kraft likes to talk about how healthy their Singles are because they have milk and calcium in every slice. I read an article here and then saw a letter from the FDA here talking about MPC, Milk Protein Concentrate.
The ingredient doesn't sound all that great. Not real milk but a milk byproduct. Not approved by the FDA. That letter was sent in 2002, I wonder if anything has happened since then. I can't wait to get home and look at the cheese I bought to see the ingredients. I may have to start making grilled cheese with real slices of cheese in the near future.
posted by Brenden Johnson @ 9:31 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Oh, I suggest you do right away. Over here, very few of us can even face processed cheese slices and if I'm making "roasted cheese" (as I call it), I reach straight for the red Scottish Cheddar. Red is actually a misnomer, since it is in fact, orange in colour. 'Red' cheese is hard to find in England and I wondered whether you guys got it over there in the States.
I love those "food descriptor" tags you get on American food products. It's funny, over here we wouldn't touch anything with artificial colours with a barge-pole, but over there you've got blue this and pink that [you sure like your cherry and watermelon "candy"]. Over here our product labelling isn't quite so "obtuse" - they at least try to describe the product in a way that makes it still sound edible.
Funny post, by the way.
Mentioning the less 'obtuse' labeling you have across the pond reminded me of my favorite label I saw when I visted Dublin/Edinburgh/London several years back:
"Smoking Kills"
No beating around the bush there. Where as here a pack of smokes might be labeled 'Studies have linked smoking to low-birth weight babies', or 'Prolonged smoking has been shown to contribute to increased risk of lung cancer'.
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