The Sweetness

There’s an awful lot of talk about food additives, flavorings, colorants, and thangs that are added to foods, beverages and whatnot. I’m shocked.

Oh, sorry. I forgot to add the sarcasm tags around my sarchasm (ha!).

There’s a lot of things added to processed foods that we totally don’t need anymore. Preservatives aren’t needed when we can just stuff the item in the freezer. Red Number 5 is just gross. The evil continues. I’m not sure what we’re gaining by pumping our foodstuffs full of unnecessary anything. Tasty things taste good already.

That being said, I hear a lot about this “high fructose corn syrup” (which for brevity I shall now call “HFCS“) these days. I hear how it’s destroying us all.

And it is.

But why?

Well, let’s first get down to basics. HFCS is a combination of water and the sugars glucose and fructose. Fructose being the sugars that are in our friends, fruits such as apples, beets, oranges, kumquats, what have you. Glucose being the sugar we produce through natural digestion so we can fuel our cells.

It’s completely innocuous.

Except it’s sugar. And it’s in goddamned everything.

Seriously, read your labels.

Why, oh why, does my peanut butter require HFCS? And, there’s no need for it in my jar of of marinara, as the whole point of tomato sauce is to have some acidity.

Frankly, I have no beef with HFCS. At all. There’s nothing wrong with it. The problem is that we overuse it. If anything needs a thicker texture, throw some HFCS at it. Needs some sweetness? Fucking HFCS. Want it to live on a shelf for a thousand years? HFCS!

What the fuck are we doing adding so much sugar to everything? There’s no reason. If it needs more sweetness, let me add it, KTHXBAI.

But I digress.