Food

One of the items of overly processed food that I need to stop eating is salad dressing. I know, of all things, this is probably one of the worst! To make myself feel better, I grabbed a couple of bottles of organic salad dressing off the shelves at the grocery store last weekend. But this is what the ingredient label looked like for one of them:

So, does anyone else find it amusing that after that ginormous list of ingredients full of words that you can't pronounce, it says in big, bold letters, "Contains: Soybeans and Wheat."

I know soy and wheat are allergens and things that folks with gluten intolerance and celiac disease want to steer clear of, but really, shouldn't you be worried about the vague "smoke flavor"?

Relatively speaking, this label doesn't have as many scary ingredients as some of the items I've seen at the grocery store. You read the labels and can't pronounce half of the ingredients and have no idea what they are, and then it says in big, bold letters: "Contains: Milk, eggs, wheat." I'm more worried about the fact that my kid is eating something that contains soy lecithin, sodium acid pyrophosphate, and high fructose corn syrup!

My next task for myself is to learn how to make my own salad dressings. I have to be careful with dressings that have a lot of oil in them, because my poor stomach still can't handle a nice oil and vinegar dressing anymore. But there's got to be a way to make my own honey mustard or Green Goddess dressings without having to buy them anymore.

The other thing that I worry about is that all of these ingredients were most likely processed before they were put into the salad dressing, and then they were processed AGAIN. Is there any nutritional value left in this salad dressing? Not bloody likely.

(And if the picture of the salad dressing ingredients magically disappears, you'll know that the company that manufactures it has most likely contacted me with a cease and desist letter, or some other threatening legal language.)