Bob and I aren’t health nuts. Not really. We like kale. We love vegetables. Except celery. I hate celery. We like nutritional yeast and couscous and soyrizo is pretty darn awesome. But we also consume enough cupcakes for six people on an almost weekly basis.
I’m going to interrupt myself here because I have the new cat on my lap as I type and it’s causing typos. I apologize in advance. But here’s a picture of him, which will explain why I can’t make him get down.
Rory Stormageddon is hard to say no to.
Back to ketchup. Bob and I do try to eat healthy but we try not to go nuts. And you know I still eat cheese.
A few months ago I started thinking about cutting high-fructose corn syrup out of my diet. I’m pretty sure I had no idea what HFCS was until I took a trip to Spain in 2009. I drank my first Coke in probably 5 years while I was there. I remember thinking it tasted different — it tasted good to me for the first time in years. I don’t remember who I was talking to but one of the people I was hanging out with in Santiago, Spain, told me he loved soda in Europe because it’s made with sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. Two weeks later — and a lot of Spanish Coca-Colas — I sat down to research HFCS. My understanding of why it’s bad is … simplistic. It’s a byproduct of corn processing, it’s been found to cause cancer in mice and it seems to be part of the obesity problem in this country. And it’s used as a pesticide in other countries. But you know, the FDA says it’s food.
Lucky for me when I floated cutting yet something else from our diet, Bob was all for it.
He had to give up Oreos, which were pretty much the only grocery store cookies he could eat. I gave up my favorite salad dressing and Hostess Zingers. I was pretty excited that we only had to throw out a few bottles of salad dressing and some barbecue sauce.
And then we ran out of ketchup. Bob has this crazy awesome black-bean burger recipe that we like to make with waffle fries. I found pickles without HFCS (Nalley pickles in general are safe. Vlassic and Steinfeld, which were what I used to buy, both have it). And even off-brand yellow mustard is safe. I’d gotten in the habit of reading labels so I grabbed the same ketchup I’d bought for years and looked at the label. Yep, high-fructose corn syrup — as the second ingredient! Why does ketchup need that much sweetener? I’m not even sure why ketchup has sugar.
The added complication is of course that not all sugar is vegan. I read the label on every bottle of ketchup at both Fred Meyer and WinCo, along with whatever stores I happened to be in during the next few weeks. The only thing I came up with was a bottle of prohibitively expensive sugar-free ketchup. We resigned ourselves to ketchup with sugar. Organic sugar is vegan so I started looking for organic ketchup. Heinz makes one but it doesn’t come in large bottles — and we go through a lot of ketchup.
Yes, we bought three bottles. Like I said, we go through a lot of ketchup.
Thank god for Trader Joe’s: Organic ketchup for $2 for a regular-sized bottle.
Organic sugar is vegan.
Being vegan can be hard on Bob — and me by proxy — in Vancouver. And we were adding this extra complication by cutting something from our diets that is in something like 35 percent of food on grocery store shelves. But we found pickles, cookies, salad dressing and ketchup. And maybe it doesn’t make a difference in the grander scheme but I feel healthier not ingesting this weird chemical byproduct that I don’t quite understand how it’s made. I understand tomatoes. I understand pasta and beer and eggplant. I even understand vegan whoopie pies from Dovetail Bakery.
Like I said Bob and I aren’t health nuts. But we do spend a fair amount of time talking about food and planning meals and trying not to be statistics. I’m not saying it’s easy — I spent three weeks on ketchup — but for us, it’s working.
I live with a vegan 