A lack of options

Yesterday I was suffering from a lack of choices. Due to the granola bar mishap of the past few days, I decided to be particularly puritanical from here on out. I was downtown at a food court in a mall and realized there was not really anything I could eat there, or be certain about at any rate. As I have learned, sugar is entirety ubiquitous in our food, especially processed foods.

Burgers buns add sugar. It's in pizza sauces, gravy, and virtually all other sauces and condiments commercially available. In fact, unless the label specifically promises no sugar in big bold writing it almost certainly does have some.
The problem for a lot of food distributors and manufacturers is they freeze, seal, or vacuum pack their food so it will be fresh on arrival. Unfortunately, a lot of flavor is lost in a frozen pizza or chicken nugget if you just unfreeze it. You need to add a preservative to keep it fresh and also tasting like something other than wet cardboard. The most common ones are of course salt. And sugar.

But they are sneaky. They have large budgets and food labs, and can determine how much sugar or salt is just enough to preserve flavor without being overpowering. They have introduced it into our diet and done it so slowly that we scarcely noticed it and now it is undetected in most of our foods. Think of it: many people forego meat, dairy, and even gluten without much difficulty. But you practically have to force someone at gunpoint to give up sugar. It's still very fringe, because it's so very common in our modern diets. And the scary thing is, I am only referring to the hidden sugars in food. Think of all the candy, chocolates, and soda we all consume so regularly. We are sweetening ourselves to death and we hardly know to what extent.

Which leaves me at the food court, woozily hungry and trying to find something that was edible. After much deliberation and consideration, I settled on a large order of fries. It wasn't perfect, but it was all I could manage. They were the tastiest goddamn fries I'd ever eaten.