Safe Food vs. Dangerous Food

You and I can have all the brilliant orange cheesey puffs we want. We can live on it and feed our kids nothing but this. Why would anyone call this a dangerous food? All the ingredients are LEGAL, folks.

I believe cheesey puffs would be at the big fat bottom end of the food pyramid, along with all the carbs the USDA thinks we should load up on. Puffs are kinda like bread, after all. Sort of. Or... are they a vegetable?

Actually, looking at them, I'm wondering if that orange occurs in nature. It looks muted here in the photo, but pretty alarming in real life. You've seen it if you've been in any Walmart.

So, is there any real food in that ingredient list? Let's see...

Corn, canola, cottonseed and soybean products are GMO -- so definitely not real food in my book.

Fresh whey is good food. But only if FRESH. I'm going to jump to conclusions here and assume this ingredient is not. We know it's not from fresh, grass-fed raw milk. Yes, I know what they say about assumptions, but I'm willing to take the leap.

Cheddar cheese, butter and buttermilk all usually count as food, although since this is all pasteurized, it has little healthful food value left. Pasteurization kills all the good stuff.

Annato extract is what makes cheese yellow. It's unnecessary and is an allergen. Maltodextrin is starch from corn which, as we know, is 95% GMO, therefore, not a food. Click here for the basics - click "GMO Education" top left!.

Real salt is incredibly healthful food. Here, however, I'm thinking they used über processed table salt which is devoid of all the good. In this house, we eat real salt with all the minerals in tact, so yummy! Once you eat the good stuff, you regret all those years of Morton's.

Ah, now comes the really tricky stuff: "natural and artificial flavors." The phrase "natural flavors" always makes me chuckle because it's so misleading. I'm surprised food manufacturers are allowed to get away with it. Rather, I wish I were surprised. The truth is there is nothing "natural" about these flavors. EXCEPT the, um, flavor:

Both artificial and natural flavors are made by “flavorists” in a laboratory by blending either “natural” chemicals or “synthetic” chemicals to create flavorings. -- Phil Lempert, Supermarket Guru

Monosodium glutamate is a neurotoxin blamed for pretty much everything. Why it is still legal to add this to food is a mystery. Why any thinking American would eat it is beyond baffling. Has the phrase "thinking American" become an oxymoron yet?

I'm worried because, as you can see by the ginormous display, people are actually buying this stuff. Presumably to eat.

Yellow No. 5 (whether dye or lake) is actually Tartrazine. It's pretty to look at, but don't eat it. It has some known health risks. Likewise Yellow No. 6. Risky but, hey, still legal. We can live on the stuff if we so choose, health risks or no. Hmmm. Surely the FDA is going to ban it soon like they did Vitamins B6 and B17 and raw milk. Wouldn't you think?

Sometimes I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the fact that it is actually illegal to drink raw milk straight from the cow.

So. The USDA and FDA say YES to cheesey puffs, NO to raw milk. Because we are still thinking Americans, this makes no sense at all to us. We're not going to comply at this house. You?