First Ingredient

Since Sarah is devoted to keeping our family free from foods with plastics in them, if anything tasty is to be bought for our pantry, I have to make my own trip to the grocery store.  This is why, the other night, I found myself at King Soopers picking up pre-cooked bratwurst for our family’s dinner.  It’s also how I came across a fantastic sale on snack cakes; the supermarket people, in their infinite wisdom, keep the snack cakes near the hot dog rack.

Our two-year-old simplified my snack cake decision process by screaming “Donut!” at the top of his lungs.  I snatched a bag of Dolly Madison Chocolate Frosted Donut Gems and started to walk away when, thankfully, my inner snack cake connoisseur reminded me that I was making a rookie mistake.  So I turned back, replaced the bag, and began a rigorous comparison of expiration dates. 

The front-most bags had an expiration date two weeks in the future.  “Not bad for donuts,” I thought.  But the bags farther back on the rack showed a date that was one full month out.  “Even better for donuts!” I shouted.  As did the kid.

The wife scowled when we returned home, naturally, knowing full well that she would devour half the bag before either of our heads hit a pillow.  But I smiled, killed her with kindness a little, and later that night I beat her, fair and square, to the bag of donuts.  (She was off doing some pretend chore, like “putting the children to bed.” ) 

I pounded four or five of the gems before sneaking a peek at the label to see whether the ingredient list was as bad as the lady of the house would lead me to believe.  Alas, the label says the first two ingredients* in a Dolly Madison Chocolate Frosted Donut Gem are:

• SUGAR
• PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED VEGETABLE AND/OR ANIMAL SHORTENING (CONTAINS ONE OR MORE OF: SOYBEAN, COTTONSEED, CANOLA, PALM KERNEL, COCONUT OR PALM OIL, BEEF FAT)

There are two ways of looking at this.  (1) These “donuts” are but balls of sugar dipped in plastic-like beef fat.  (2) These “donuts” have soybean in them, so my consumption of them makes me pretty much a Vegan.

In any case, I left the rest of the bag for the wife and kids.

* It is my understanding that ingredients are required to be listed in the order of their percentage of presence in the product, so these two ingredients make up the majority of the donut gem.