I didn't have time to pack my lunch before I left for work today. I usually take leftovers from dinner the night before, but there weren't any this morning. Since I work in a grocery store there is food available, though much of it I choose not to eat. I wracked my brain trying to think of what would be acceptable off the shelf for a quick lunch.
I try to stay away from processed foods, as much as I am able. I also try to avoid vegetable oils and anything with HFCS and soybean derivatives. In this day and age it is very difficult to find anything in the grocery that meets that criteria. I thought about the pouches of salmon in the canned meat aisle. Surely, I thought, it's just salmon - - and since I've been eating a lot of grain fed beef lately, fish would be a good thing to eat to try to balance out my Omega 3's and 6's.
I grabbed a pouch and headed for the checkout, hurriedly since I only have a very short time for my lunch break. The front of the package proclaimed it was a good source of Omega 3, and that the salmon was wild caught. Awesome! I sat down, tore open the package, and started to dig in. It tasted pretty good. I thought I'd read the ingredients on the back of the package, just for the sake of curiosity...Salmon and vegetable broth...cool...(including SOYBEANS). Damn it! I was lulled into a false sense of security by the "good" stuff listed on the front of the pouch. Silly me, I didn't read the ingredients before I jumped right in. I know better, but time was of the essence.
I ate about 3/4 of the package anyway. I was hungry.
Oh well, next time I don't have time to pack a lunch before work I may just skip it. I won't starve, and I won't be ingesting any surprise ingredients that I'd rather take a pass on.
Labels: food, ingredients, labels, soybeans
I love canned salmon and eat it quite often, I think the ingredients are just wild salmon and water. I've never seen the pouches before, perhaps we don't have them here in where I live (Canada). I'll have to be more diligent about checking ingredients on seemingly non-industrialized foods.
ReplyDelete@Judy - Yeah, it's just the pouches. I eat the canned salmon frequently myself and knew that those were just salmon and water. I guess that's the main reason I never thought to look at the ingredients initially on the pouch. Were it not for the added "vegetable broth" in the pouch salmon, it would be much more convenient to eat at work than the canned salmon. We pay in many ways for the sake of convenience, huh?
ReplyDeleteSardines are wonderful, and you can get them packed in water, and sometimes olive oil. Very tasty, and the bones are included for extra calcium. I always keep some cans in the house for grab-and-go lunches.
ReplyDeleteSardines are another one of my favorites. I get them packed in water. I haven't found any packed in olive oil, but if they are anything like the tuna packed in olive oil they also have soybean oil in them - - and that's not a good thing.
ReplyDeleteI have several cans in my cupboard and eat them with Dijon mustard...yum!