Macheesmo

It’s been a few months since I’ve done a Guess the Food so I thought I throw one out there this week just to make sure you guys aren’t getting rusty!

If you’re a new reader, this is a kind of post where I post the nutritional information for a food and people try to guess what it is.

The goal is to have some fun and also take an in-depth look at what’s in our food these days!

Nutritional Marketing. It’s all the rage lately for food manufacturers to plaster a ton of nutritional facts and benefits all over their packaging. But, as we learned in previous Guess the Foods (See #5 and #6), these can almost always be taken with a grain of salt.

This food doesn’t have too many crazy claims. It has two though that we can size up once we get to the actual ingredients:

1) Made with real honey.

2) Made with 5g of whole Grain per serving. There’s an asterisk next to this item that goes on to say, “Nutritionists recommend eating 3 or more servings of whole grain foods per day. About 16g whole grain per serving or at least 48g per day.)

As you’ll see, neither of these are false, but they definitely don’t tell the whole story. I found the asterisk pretty funny because it subtly implies that you should just eat more of this product.

The Salt and The Sweet. If there are two flavor profiles that will snag most hungry people, it’s salty and sweet. If you take a look at the nutritional information on this, you’ll see that it’s really just a salt and sweet collision.

A few other notes that I was able to pick up from the nutritional info:

• Serving Size. 8 of these things only have 130 calories. So they must be kind of smallish.
• Carb city. Of the 31 gram serving size, 24 of the grams are Carbs. A good chunk of those is sugar. So this is sweet but not candy bar sweet.
• Salty. While these guys aren’t nearly as sweet as a candy bar, they have double the sodium of most candy bars.
• Empty. Besides having a bit of protein and some fiber, whatever these things are, they are pretty nutritionally void. They have no vitamins besides a bit of iron.

I’ll be the first to admit that while these facts don’t really look all that appealing, these guys are right in my wheelhouse taste-wise. I very much like them mainly because I love salty-sweet things!

The Ingredients. This is always the section that reveals what’s going on behind the scenes.

Specifically, if you check out these ingredients you’ll find that while these are made with some whole grain, they are made mainly with nutritionally void enriched flour. Also, while they do have some honey, they have more of a less natural sweetener, High Fructose Corn Syrup.

But let’s start from the top:

Unbleached Enriched Flour – I’m not going to break down all of the individual parts in the flour they use, but basically anytime you see the word enriched flour, your ears should perk up. They have to enrich the flour because they strip out all the nutrients in the flour to preserve shelf-life. Real flour is much more nutritious than this stuff.

Sugar – The next ingredient is good old sugar. I was a bit surprised to see this in the list since there are two other sweeteners in the list.

Graham Flour – This is the whole grain flour they reference on the front of the box. Why can’t they just use this flour for all of the flour needed in the recipe? Well, two reasons. One, that would probably make the product too grainy. Second, it would make it more expensive.

Soybean oil and/or Partially Hydrogenated Cottonseed Oil – Two kinds of pretty standard processing oils. The partial hydrogenation just makes the oil a solid at room temperature.

High Fructose Corn Syrup – The vilified sweetener in the food industry these days. What I mainly don’t like about it is how processors sneak it into almost everything on grocery shelves.

Honey – Real honey! It’s way down there. I have no doubt that there’s just a few drops of honey per serving. Just enough to say it’s made with honey. No more. No less.

Leavening Agents – A few standard leavening agents which makes the final product less brick-like.

Salt – Gotta have it!

Artificial Flavors – I’d be curious if they use a honey artificial flavor. Ha!

Soy Lecithin – Exactly what it says, an emulsifier. It keeps all the ingredients mixed up while they are being prepared.

Cornstarch – I’m kind of at a loss as to why this particular item needs cornstarch, but it doesn’t need much of it. If I had to guess, I’d say it probably acts as a stabilizer/preservative.

That’s all there is to it!

So. Can you guess this salty/sweet food?

As always, if you have a suggestion for a future Guess the Food, contact me!