ratcreature | random food thought

I sometimes wonder just how sweet people seem to tolerate their food. Don't get me wrong, I like sugary things a lot (no matter that refined sugar is not good for you), but a lot of sweet industrial food is just too extreme for me, despite my pronounced sweet tooth.

For example I really like crunchy chocolate "muesli" (I'm using quotes because I don't think it truly falls within the spirit of muesli when the rolled oats are roasted into crunchy deliciousness with sugar and the only other (possible) cereals in it are some kind of popped chocolate thingies, and also it has chocolate pieces...however it is sold under that label); the rolled oats don't get as soggy in the clusters and it has chocolate in it, so I find it tasty. However the cheap kind I buy(*) is entirely too sweet to eat directly. So to have chocolate muesli for breakfast I always mix one part of that with one part plain rolled oats and one part plain popped amaranth, both unsweetened, and then I arrive at a still very sweet mix. So it works out, but I really wonder whether anyone eats it undiluted.

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(*) For comparison, it costs less than half per 750g box (€1.79) than my plain rat food mix, which also comes in that bag size and cost nearly €4 (though I mostly buy it in the larger 2.5kg bags that are a bit cheaper per kg, but still cost much more per unit than said chocolate muesli), so this strikes me rather frequently when I hand over money during pet food store runs, and then wonder whether they are either fleecing me for pet food, as my rats don't get any extra special organic gourmet rat food or anything, or whether I should worry about what exactly they sell me as breakfast cereal that it cost so much less than the processed grain/vegetable/animal protein mix they sell as rat food.

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I kinda wonder the same thing, because I have a major sweet tooth for desserts and such, but a lot of processed food really boggles me at how overly sweet (or salty, overspiced, etc) it tends to be. And starting my day with a bowl of sugar just doesn't feel good. We eat a lot of granola and have tried for a long time to find a bran that isn't unpleasantly sweet, but you pretty much have to put up with it or make your own, apparently. (The idea of diluting actually had not occurred to me! Now I'm thinking that maybe it'd be a good idea to toast some oats and keep them on hand to tone down the oversweetness of commercial granola and make it last longer.)

Yeah. I'm not all that zealous against eating processed food in principle, but I mostly cook from scratch as I have little money but time enough, and I guess that may sensitize you as well to how extreme some of the pre-made stuff is. (Though frankly some of the sanctimonious "food processing is evil" crusaders get on my last nerve, and I spent much of my formative young adult years in the company of and sympathizing with vegan animal rights activists, who I always thought could not be topped in preachiness about food.)

I don't always want sweet chocolatey things for breakfast, often I eat plain porridge with fruit or bread or other stuff, but sometimes I really like that kind of thing. Only not quite as sweet as the option sold.

I even tried one of the extra expensive organic oat chocolate crunchy mueslis once, but that was almost as sweet, only in the ingredients was organic brown cane sugar, instead of regular sugar. I guess people who like their oats in crunchy roasted clusters rather than natural oats mostly prefer them really sweet, regardless of whether they buy organic or not. So I went back to the one that is much more in my price range, and diluting works out quite well, since obviously plain oats are cheaper still, even if it's then not all crunchy, as I don't bother to roast the plain rolled oats myself.

I agree - I have a major sweet tooth (I'm eating chocolate right now!) but that's not what I want for breakfast. I make up my own cereal mix out of four or five different things.

Then again, I almost never had sugar (or salt) as a kid, so my tastebuds are pretty warped.

I had a lot of sugar as a kid, even for breakfast. My mother wasn't much for health food, but would get a bunch of fresh pastries and croissants from the bakery nearby. I'd get these periodic food ideas due to the nutrition classes in school and what you ought to have for breakfast, so I asked to eat muesli instead and got mocked by my family for wanting to eat "bird food". I never managed to stick with the muesli plan in the face of fresh cinnamon pastries and croissants. I did manage to stick with not drinking cola or any soda anymore since I was ten or eleven or so when it was what I had been drinking before, but I saw a tv spot on a children's show about how it could clean rust on metal and dissolve meat and was so shocked by that, that I resolved to never ever drink soda again. That was frequently socially awkward, and my mother thought I wouldn't stick with it for more than a few weeks (though she bought me water and juice readily enough when I asked for it), but I never touched Cola again, and soon after even stopped other lemonades, and have kept with that ever since.

Hooray! I'm not the only person who doesn't drink soda! I never had it growing up and just never got the habit. I don't drink alcohol either, which is also socially awkward in a heavy drinking culture.

My mother was a health nut (I think she actually has an eating disorder, based on later evidence) and really didn't want us to eat much at all, apart from fruit and raw vegetables (yes, all vegetables except potato and sometimes pumpkin). No sugar, no salt, rice cakes in our lunch...and two of us grew up fat and the other one underweight.

Just raw vegetables sounds cruel (also what about beans and other legumes? you have to cook those), and I don't think that's the way to go nutritionally either. I mean, haven't our ancestors been using fire for cooking stuff for so long that basically the last time we were stuck with an all raw food died we were still a different species or something?

My mom cooked pretty traditional fare for the most part (just as muesli was mocked as bird food, salads got dismissed as rabbit food...) though she never forced me to eat things I didn't like beyond trying it once. She tried some adjustments for healthier food when my father got heart problems, and then later for her diabetes, but still didn't take it too well when I decided to become vegetarian as a teenager. I think she took it as if I just meant it to offend her cooking. And that even though my older brother had been a vegan for some time, but he had moved out by then.

And I actually don't drink alcohol either, which was very socially awkward here as well, especially in school. You are allowed to drink beer and wine with 16, and later in high school when we went to pubs with teachers for beer, and the school parties allowed beer and wine (only vodka and hard alcohol was officially against the rules). I was pretty much alone in my abstinence aside from a couple of the muslims who were actually religious and followed that no alcohol rule.

Mostly I don't drink because my mom was an alcoholic, and I really don't trust myself to use drugs responsibly. I never tried any other either, and it took me until my mid-twenties before I decided that caffeine would be okay as war as drug habituation goes, and accustomed myself to coffee, because it got really old to not just turn down alcohol and pot, but also coffee every time. Though in a defiance of statistics, my brother and sister both don't drink any alcohol either (and I'm actually the only one of us drinking coffee) and none of us smoke, even though both our parents were smokers too. So at least I wasn't completely alone in my abstinence. My parents raised a group of teetotalers in opposition to their example. :)

We didn't eat any beans except occasionally baked beans - it was kind of a limited diet! I didn't start drinking coffee until I went to Japan, either, but then it was a social response, because it was really, really rude not to accept a drink of some kind.

Teetotallers in response to smokers and an alcoholic sounds very sensible to me!

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