The Fast Food Thread
Well any kind of soup is going to be loaded with salt it's just a given.
http://www.noodles.com/nutrition/
It's almost like these food company's think they can't sell food unless it's sweet and salty.
Its a two fold cause. On the production side, they need it to keep the food tasting fresh (irony) while it sits in the heated tubs all day. On the demand side, most of us are stressed out of our minds and stressed bodies crave three things.
The body assumes its 10k year ago and that the stress means were about to go hungry for 2 months and piles on the essentials. Only the stress has nothing to do with food supply so we want more of what we should have less of, which is simultaneously stupid easy to now get.
No recipe for disaster there!
Hell I wish they would look into natural ways to add longer shelf life to food. But we have been using these chemicals since after WW2 and lot of execs who donate to lots people running for office would out of a job.
Its a good point. There is massive incentive to make things unnatural, if only because you can't patent natural. But even if more people wanted to make things better, we're also caught in the economy-of-scale trap. You make 100x more of one thing, even if it should cost double to produce, and it will cost way way less per unit. So until the organic option tips 50% of total production, it will cost more to produce. Then you add the organic tax onto that and its going to be a long wait. Just try to forget that food was 100% organic for all of history and we had to invent non organic.
Chemically, the obstacle is decomposition. Nature is very efficient and part of that efficiency is that anything dead needs to recycled into something alive asap. So anything that lasts longer after death (be it wheat cut from the field or animal bled out), is by nature, unnatural. Refrigeration is pretty much the only game in town for not altering the basic structure and flavor of something.
I visit Five Guys once or twice each summer. Not really a fast food person. If I want a burger Flemings has the prime burger for $6 during happy hour.
I've tried five guys a few times. They only have double paddies and I've never liked double paddies, so it always turns into a 6 arm circus with the employees trying to figure out which buttons to push to make something with less.
PSA: when I was told to change my diet or else, I did a bunch of research on how to make food from scratch without all the from-scratch work. What I ended up getting is a counter top appliance called Thermomix. Familiar in Europe, Australia, and Canada, its nearly impossible to get in the US (may change next year).
Combined with a good toaster oven (see Breville), you can do just about anything in 15 minutes or less. For breakfast, I've been able to replace $4/box processed cold cereal with non instant, no sugar, no salt, no chemical $0.25 oatmeal - apples, cinnamon, vanilla, whole oats. In less time than it takes to sit in a drive through.
