By Gene Ayres

Many of you might remember the old TV campaign by Dupont, trying to promote the idea that a pervasive chemical soup permeating our water, food, atmosphere, living and working environment was really a good thing. Certainly anyone who’s ever driven north or south on I-95 through Delaware has had a first-hand look (taste, and smell) of just how profoundly spurious a claim that really is, from America’s first corporation, the folks that made their fortune bringing us gunpowder.

Now that Dow, Dupont, Monsanto and ilk have pretty much finalized their control over our economy and government, we can see that giving the corporate plutocracy a free hand has not done us a whole lot of good.

I’ve talked about sugar in pretty much everything we eat or drink these days. But how about all those other additives with names we can’t even pronounce, and you’d need a PhD in chemistry to even remotely comprehend or identify? Take another gander at your kitchen cupboard. Unless you’re a hard-core, dyed in the wool organic foods freak (with a commensurate budget to be able to afford such luxuries) pretty much everything on the shelf has some products that you wouldn’t willingly feed your kid, or yourself, if you knew what they actually were. But the beauty of it all is, you don’t know. And ignorance has always been the safest form of bliss.

Never the less, here’s a small sampling from my shelf:

A&W root beer: reasonably moderate, apart from the high fructose corn syrup (i.e. sugar, sugar, sugar) it’s just good old caramel color, sodium benzoate (which we are reassured is merely a preservative. Like, maybe, formaldehyde?), and “natural and artificial flavors.” That pretty much covers the elemental charts. For those of you who still live in Disneyland, “natural” flavors mean anything derived from living organisms, which might as well include snake venom. As for artificial flavors, those, like food colorings, are almost entirely petroleum byproducts.

Welcome (back) to the hydrocarbons economy, folks!

OK, surely from the gourmet foods department, no less than Wolfgang Puck wouldn’t besmirch our gustatory well being (and his reputation) with anything so lowbrow as chemical food additives, right?

Right. Everything in his “creamy roast chicken with wild rice” Hearty Soup is natural. That is, if you don’t mind a little “hydrolyzed corn protein” thrown in, for extra flavor. Hydrolyzed corn protein is yet another one of those clever little pseudonyms for MSG, i.e. monosodium glutamate, which makes a lot of people, including yours truly, literally sick. But, hey, at least there’s lots of (you guessed it) sugar, in there. Don’t you always add a spoonful or two of sugar to your soup? Apparently Wolfgang Puck does. Along with the MSG.

Which leads us to one of my favorite food categories: salad dressing. This wonderful food product, which has made my Chinese wife utterly starry-eyed in its endless and wondrous variety (they don’t have salads, as such---let alone dressings--in Chinese cuisine, Chinese chicken salad being an American invention). And the assortment is truly wonderful, running from plain old mayonnaise and Thousand Island to Raspberry vinaigrette, balsamic pesto, champagne ranch, to bleu cheese, Roquefort cheese, to the house dressings of every upscale restaurant on the planet.

And of course, like with beer, you can get the corporate brand selection which runs approximately from Kraft to Kraft, to your hometown’s local favorite Miss Poppycock’s All-Natural Sesame Street what have you sauce. What all of them will contain are your basic vegetable oil (with all the trans fat, saturated fat, and fat chance fat you can absorb), salt (another commodity that can either kill or cure you depending on quality and source), sugar (of course), and then, at least with the corporate brands, the inevitable xanthan gum (did you ever wonder just what that was?), disodium phosphate, sorbic acid, calcium dosdium EDTA, disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate, and of course, monosodium glutamate. Enough already! Anyway, at least the salad is natural. (Or is it? You don’t even want to know what’s in that lettuce, courtesy of the defense contractors upstream from your produce farm!)

For the kids, you’ll of course have a good supply of macaroni and cheese on hand. Along with some sodium phosophate, sodium alginate, lactic acid, sorbic acid, and of course those good old “natural and artificial colors and flavors.”

My current chemical favorite for creativity (and chutzpah) has to be a product called “Instant Oatmeal.” Used to be that oatmeal consisted of dried oats, and maybe a sprinkle of salt. Period. But then the corporate food packagers just couldn’t leave well enough alone. In addition to the usual sugar and salt and artificial colors and flavors to simulate bananas, blueberries, strawberries, and peaches (since god forbid you should dare to use the real thing!) they offer you a “creaming agent,” lots of Blue #40 and Red dye #4 to make it more beautiful, the usual calcium carbonate, guar gum, pyridoxine hyrdrochloride (didn’t they use that at Buchenwald?) and sodium sulfite, no doubt a close cousin to sodium sulfate. That’s the stuff in wine that gives you those lovely headaches.

I could go on. But never mind. It’s almost dinner time. If there’s a moral here it’s simply this: buy real ingredients and make your own.

Bon appetite!