Eating Better Yet?

Ok, so yesterday was not a stellar day for eating better. In fact, I think I ate almost everything in the house. I do not do well at home all day.

However, I did discover that Sam's has ORGANIC raspberries this week. They are gorgeous and only $3.85 for 12 oz. Andrew and I spent the afternoon experimenting with dry ice freezing. I froze 60 oz of the raspberries. My hope is that they will be good for oatmeal this fall/winter -- though it really doesn't take me long to polish off 12 oz of raspberries, so they may not last into the winter months.

I'm not sure we did the freezing correctly. We put the dry ice in the bottom of a small cooler, and then place aluminum foil pans of raspberries on top of the ice. It would have been better to have the dry ice on top of the fruit, but I was afraid it would crush the berries. Plus, we couldn't find the heavy duty gloves needed for handling the ice.

The first tray of raspberries didn't completely freeze, and when I vacuum sealed them, some were crushed. The later berries didn't freeze quickly, but they stayed whole under the vacuum pressure (I think one or two shattered).

Half way through this exercise, it did occur to me that I could probably buy raspberries in the freezer section for about the $5.30 it was costing me to freeze them (including the $9 for the dry ice), but that will be something to investigate later.

On another note, the paper is reporting that Spaghetti-O's canned as long ago as 2008 are subject to recall because the meat may not have been fully cooked. GROSS! I wonder if we can really trust big companies with our food? If there has been a problem for 2 years with this factory, why has no one said anything before now? Is no one checking the plant? I'm going to imagine that the company was simply not willing to recall the food, face the expense of admitting they were wrong, until they simply could not avoid it any longer.

No one has reported becoming ill from the food, but that really just means that no one was either sick enough to seek medical attention, or if they did, it was not bad enough for anyone to do a full on investigation into what made them sick. Personally, I don't go to the doctor if I "just have a tummy issue." I get sick, then get better. There was only one time when myself or my kids were sick enough to seek medical attention for "stomach flu" -- and the doctor didn't care what made my son sick, only that he didn't remain sick or become dehydrated.

At some point, we as Americans are either going to have to demand better supervision of our food production, or go back to making food ourselves.