Another Victim of the High Fructose Corn Syrup Backlash
What can I say? Even a girl who’s tasked to write about food on a daily basis needs a pizza and fries kind of night. And so we ordered a large cheese and crispy potatoes on the side. This would have been an uneventful meal save for the use of new ketchup.
It looks like Heinz has fallen to the sword of real sugar and came out with a no-high fructose corn syrup rendition of their tomato spread. Last Target trip, my boyfriend picked up “Simply Heinz” and promptly ditched its chemical predecessor, therefore crippling our chances for a quick blind taste test.
Now, I totally fucking hate ketchup. (Viva la Mustard!) And, frankly, I’m not even sure if homemade ketchup could persuade me otherwise. But I saved one fry from a dip into a spicy mustard for a taste of the newly enhanced, newly natural ketchup. To me, it still tasted like ketchup. I’m still baffled why people want this weird sweet liquid crap on their fries, or anything. Why is it so sweet? Why!
Anyway, 80, an official ambassador for ketchup, liked the new product:
A little bit different. Less sweet. Lighter. Tastes like ketchup I had in England years ago. I probably could tell the difference in a taste test.
So for now, we’ll have to take his word on the difference. But I did steal a packet that they sent with the fries. Testing for another day. In the meantime, feel free to read some brain washing by the Corn Refiners Association.
Photo from flickr user Maalokki
I’m as big a ketchup hater as they come, but I think it’s pretty cool that the anti-HFCS forces have forced a change in even so processed a product.
yea. i think its wonderful that big companies are listening to consumers and changing their ingredients. and of course, im so excited that consumers are demanding this.
and i mean to look before i left the house today, but now im nervous my mustard has HFCS in it. oops!
no! mustard would never do that to us.
It’s funny… there’s a soda I like that advertises the crap out of the fact that they use regular sugar instead of HFCS. And I suck the shit down like it’s water. And then I think about how silly it is that, somehow, products that use real sugar instead of fructose are able to jump on the healthy / local / organic bandwagon. HFCS or sugar, to me the key is moderating our enjoyment of all uber-sweet / uber-fatty delicious things. That said, I’d be happy to see our farmers grow food for eating, rather than getting gov’t subsidies to grow goo-corn for sugar and ethanol.
Good post! I have not seen the “Simply Heinz” in the grocery store yet. However, it all comes down to marketing. Consumers believe it is more healthy if it has real sugar in it instead of HFCS, when in fact they have a similiar nutrition composition.
yes, tim. thank you for pointing out that sugar can still be the enemy, regardless if its natural or not. its like me thinking im being more healthy for drinking “mexican” coke instead of the regular coke.
but i think you make an even better point – the issue surrounding HFCS is more than it invading our food, its about corn depleting the diversity of our farmland. thanks for reminding us of the bigger picture.
@ brooke, isn’t it better for our bodies to ingest something natural (sugar) than something created in a lab (HFCS)?
and for those keep score at home in mustard v. ketchup…
the ingredients of my mustard are as followed: vinegar, water, mustard seed, salt, tumeric