Children of the Corn... Syrup

Shopping for groceries with children is always a frantic and forgetful experience. I have read stories of teaching children colors and things like that by walking through the produce. That sounds like a wonderful idea, however WALKING through the produce aisle doesn't happen with my kids. It's more of a riding the cart, jump off and hope mom is looking, run towards the cookies type of trip with my two assistant shoppers. This means I don't have a whole lot of time to read ingredients. I go for as many things that say organic as possible. Recently though I had a trip to the store that required extra caution.

I went to the junky discount grocery. The one that has Pop Tarts, Trix, and florescent "fruit" snacks the moment you walk into the door. Artificial is the main word you see. They do, by popular demand of our nations "green" trend have organic things. You have to search but the prices are low enough it might be worth the battle.

I found some turkey burgers that seemed OK and went to grab some buns to go with them. The first one I picked up was pretty inexpensive so I checked the ingredients. Corn Syrup was number 2 on the list. After checking every bun they had, and some brands I had picked up at other stores without looking. Corn Syrup was on every one of them.

Next stop... "mommy can we get applesauce? I like it now!" Sure! Ground up apples sound like a great cool summer treat. Once again, corn syrup. On one of them it came on the ingredient list BEFORE apples. I'm not sure how that was even possible. After some digging I managed to find one that didn't contain that nasty ingredient. Thank you Tree Top!

Now, we are in a nation that has a childhood obesity problem. I have heard it blamed on video games and too much TV. I'm not saying they aren't to blame some, but come one! Corn syrup is in pretty much everything we buy. You have to really go out of your way to avoid it and with two children in the store it's pretty exhausting to do.

Recent studies have shown that as the use of Corn syrup in food has increased there has been a parallel increase in cases of diabetes. With all the activities that kids are signed up for these days it really is hard for me to believe that sedimentary lifestyle alone is to blame for the weight gain of American youth.

Simply avoiding products that are known sweets like cookies and cake just doesn't work. I ordered broccoli for Zionna at a market and the helpful sales person informed me that there was corn syrup in the broccoli I was about to purchase and she asked me if I was sure I wanted it. This was a rare instance of a person caring enough to tell me. I was extremely grateful for the information but mostly I was shocked.

The floods in the Midwest took out a bunch of corn fields, there is rumor of food prices going up even more because of this. Gee, do you think if they removed corn syrup from the ingredient list of all these foods maybe we wouldn't be in such bad shape price wise?

It's going to be hard, and I will have to find a recipe for hamburger buns, but my family is done with corn syrup.