Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Your Baby Got Honey Sauce

My car likes me again. I had let the poor thing get filthy and only today managed to take it to the car wash. The spiders got vacuumed out (I hope); the windows got scrubbed clean; the outside is once again shiny. Now I just need an oil change and all will be well. I think I've mentioned before that I didn't use to be a car washer. It was purely a twice a year affair. But cars don't get a little dirty here, they get can't see through the windshield filthy. Wash Me! filthy. I can't remember the color of my car filthy. So in this land of no water, washing the car is a moral imperative.

The thing about the lunchtime carwash run is that the easiest lunch is from KFC. I happen to like some KFC on occasion, but that's neither here nor there. Today with my lunch, which came with a biscuit, I got a packet of sauce. Not just any sauce, Honey Sauce. WTF? The ingredients (from memory) are:
High Fructose Corn Syrup
Sugar
Honey
Corn Syrup
Natural Flavor
Food Coloring

While I understand that honey is sugar, sugar is sugar, and corn syrup is sugar, they are not all the same sugar. Certainly corn syrup is cheapest in part because we subsidize the heck out of it. It is becoming apparent that in the millenia of mammals and insects sharing space on the planet, mammals have become good at digesting honey (or the microbes in our guts have, but it amounts to the same thing) but are not so good at digesting High Fructose Corn Syrup, a very recent acquaintance. I know that KFC couldn't toss in a free packet of real honey without throwing away good money. But I can't handle the concept of Honey Sauce. It's a gratuitous fake.

Before you think I've gone all righteous, I still drink a soda or two a week, which I know very well is poison. I limit the quantity, but Coke and Dr. Pepper and Squirt have me in their flavor thrall. So despite my efforts to cut out HFCS, I will allow some in the door. But I have no reason in the world to develop a taste for Honey Sauce.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

While reading this entry, I had a faint sense of deja vu, and then it finally hit me a day later where I had heard this same topic before:

http://www.sjgames.com/ill/2003/jan.html

Look at the January 22 entry.

Unknown said...

Oh, and should you ever come to Texas, I will have to get you some Dublin Dr Pepper, which is made with Imperial Cane SUGAR, not HFCS. :) Or you could order it here:

http://www.olddocs.com/results.aspx?cat=Drinks&subcat1=Dr+Pepper

CrankyOtter said...

oooh! real Dr. Pepper! I might be in Austin for one of the upcoming major holidays. The fambly is still in the negotiation phase.

SINFUL said...

I heard about two months ago that the honey bees are mysteriously disappearing . . . might be cell phones . . . really! Might be terrorism . . . honest it was a theory!! Best bet is they don't know why. But honey sauce could be the future. Poor Pooh!

CrankyOtter said...

My neighbor is collecting dead bees in the hopes that they can help research this problem with the dead bees. Although technically, honeybees are an invasive - we brought them over here, they are not native. I think there are bees that are native though. Not an expert on that.

I do have an acquaintance who is a beekeeper in the midwest. It's fascinating to listen to how much one can know about bees. (They make patterns in the honeycombs, you know they're sick if the patterns lose symmetry. Cool.) Anyhow, We were trying to figure out an ASL sign for "beekeeper" and he settled on BEE SHEPHERD with a K handshape on shepherd. The native deaf people he tried it on thought he was insane. Then he explained in more detail and they REALLY thought he was insane. Most of them didn't know you had to raise bees to get honey and laughed and laughed at the concept.

I've heard recently that the cell phone thing might be a red herring. I hope so because I make chips for cell phones to pay the bills...