Food

This Sunday we decided to go all Utah and make a jello salad. For those who don't know, jello salad is jello with fruits in it. In Utah you can also add shredded carrots. It's eaten with Cool Whip, sort of a whipping cream substitute. The part that made us excited was that there is hardly any basic ingredients in the whole food, it's super sweet and in Utah it's despite all this often served not as dessert but as salad. As far as I've understood it all. Young girls learn to make the jello from package, mix in some fruits and vegetables (yak for the last) and spread Cool Whip on top. We had some guests that we already had prepared by telling them about the least "natural" of all dishes, so when they saw it they were very impressed. All the guests are more, how should I say it, European style cooks - use fresh vegetables and basic ingredients in all their cooking. So are we, mostly.

Jello salad was good (we didn't add shredded carrots) - how could it not be with all that sugar? In fact, I shouldn't say sugar, since I think both jello and cool whip are sweetened of course with high fructose corn syrup. This very far processed sweetener turns up everywhere here in the US. We will all be mostly corn after a couple of years of eating it in everything.

I have missed most of the ready made box foods (or canned foods) in the US, but I'm one of the few. In fact, some children (young for sure) don't recognize fresh vegetables when they see it... There's a funny show, Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, that follows a british chef trying to help children eat healthy foods in West Virginia - see the trailer here.

In Finland they used to have a list of so called "added ingredients" in food, meaning salt and all that extra stuff that is added for texture, colour, preserving and such. They removed them at some point (maybe because of an EU decision?) so now you just look at the amount of ingredients in anything you buy. What would jello salad show?

I don't really believe that children only like to eat unhealthy foods. A friend family of mine, the Eppels, taught me that. Yes, children are often picky if they don't know what they eat. But even I myself, the pickiest child in our family, ate raw fresh vegetables (although never cooked ones). If you set veggies out on the table so they look cute (bento box style) and separate from other veggies, and don't cook them all mushy, most children seem to eat at least some favourites. (Although with kids I think you don't get any guarantees...)

But surely, although children can be picky, adults could eat real food even in America...?