I season my lunch, the meal I’m usually eating on my own, with a pinch of reading. Which typically takes the form of whichever package is gracing the table at that time. An example: today it’s soup for lunch and looking for substance, I grab a bag of Farm Boy crackers. They’re NATURAL tortilla chips, a flavour I don’t embrace but drowning them in the soup helps me get over them. The NATURAL, in capitals, in not my doing; the manufacturer obviously doesn’t want you to miss the point, ‘These are not unnatural tortilla chips, my friends, these come from a well loved and watered tortilla tree that lets nature do all the work.’ Or some version thereof.
On to reading the bag, this is mid-May, 60 days into the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic and you’re still not sure if you’re going to get it so you medicate yourself by staying indoors where everything is safe and then you notice that this NATURAL product you’ve got swimming in your soup, these make-believe Mexican marvels, are well past their due date.
I know there are stories about people getting in a fret when something is one day past its best by date but even though my crackers are at least a month too old, I suspect they’re as fresh now as they ever were and will ever be. But it does get you to wondering: do I go out and breathe my last breath or stay in and eat myself to any early ending? Has to qualify for the lose-lose award of the times.
The other flag that has been raised recently in the news is reading the barcode to see if whatever you’re embracing was made in China or elsewhere; the elsewhere supposedly being the better place. You can find this list easily on the internet but for the purpose of keeping your attention, 690 – 695, are the first three digits that tweek your sino-phobia. So I hurriedly grab the bag and adjust my eyes to the fine print to see a leading 0.
Phew!
But not so fast, who claims the leading 0? Ah, either Canada or the good old US and A. Saved. And, while spooning my just-best-by bouillon, I search for other positive feedback on the bag to affirm that I’m staying healthy eating these now soggy saltines and zoom in on an item that says, ‘Made in Canada from domestic and imported ingredients,’ so I’m not out of the woods yet, the particles that kill the moment you pass the best by date could be the imported bits and, wait for it, not from the US and A, but from China. Aghhhhhh!
Hard to get your head into this, though. Maybe it could happen, let’s suppose, when Farm Boy decides, on a slow day, to get into the made-in-Canada-from-domestic-and-imported-ingredients NATURAL (their capitals) tortilla chip manufacturing business, because it’s May and sales of their made-somewhere NATURAL Christmas cakes are slowing, and the brain trust wonders what it would take to make these darn things better than the other guys’, does this picture appear before their dreaming eyes?
“Dr. Mildred Bentworthy, you’re our chief nutritionist, these are great but I think a dash, a soupçon if you will, of product X would get these to fly off the shelves; if you’re on side with this, who in the world supplies product X? China? Cool, I’ll put in a call for a couple of shipping containers of the stuff. Have the containers power washed just to be safe and remember to update the packaging to indicate ‘Made-in-Canada-from-domestic-and-imported-ingredients,’ and slap on a country Canada barcode.”
Could this be? Doesn’t the barcode say, ‘Canada’? A little digging on the internet indicates (Are you sitting down?) that these codes do indeed don’t 1 With apologies to, ‘Yes, we have no bananas.’ tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
There are two bodies that designate country codes so you’ve no idea which code you’re trying to translate and secondly, the code could indicate a country of manufacture not origin. So this NATURAL, their capitals, Canadian tortilla chip creation, while doubtless China free, could easily have been stirred together in purified Canadian air with the appropriate country of Canada bar code but could also have realistically absorbed, thanks to some tasty other imported ingredients from California say, the smog that smothers Los Angeles with no revealing asterisk on the barcode.
Funny how things change.
I glance at the bag’s Nutrition Facts table as I chase the last of clumps running around the bowl, just curious, to see where the big numbers are: Fat, Sodium and Carbohydrate; killers all. A year ago, these would have kept me quickly carting past this aisle in the grocery store.
So today you have a choice, you can feel sorry for yourself because of: A. COVID-19 or B. xenophobia or C. malnutrition.
Or a menu of all three. Bon
appétit.
| 1. | ↑ | With apologies to, ‘Yes, we have no bananas.’ |