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Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Jizzed Up Veggies


 Nothing says “healthy vegetables” like drowning them in “pasteurized process cheese spread” and bacon bits.

Kraft, the processed foods conglomerate who produced this cookbook for harried working Moms, has ensured that their products form the base for everything in it, no matter how inappropriate. As it happens, they needn’t have worried about whether people are getting their daily helping; Kraft Foods owns pretty much everything you see on a supermarket shelf. It would be harder to go a day without consuming a Kraft product.

While the caption uses the ridiculous phrase above, the actual recipe calls for what we all know it by: CHEEZ WHIZ. That’s a lot of Zs.

CHEEZ WHIZ came to the market in 1953, and consists of the following:

WHEY, CANOLA OIL, MILK, MILK PROTEIN CONCENTRATE, MALTODEXTRIN, SODIUM PHOSPHATE, CONTAINS LESS THAN 2% OF WHEY PROTEIN CONCENTRATE, SALT, LACTIC ACID, SODIUM ALGINATE, MUSTARD FLOUR, WORCESTERSHIRE SAUCE (VINEGAR, MOLASSES, CORN SYRUP, WATER, SALT, CARAMEL COLOR, GARLIC POWDER, SUGAR, SPICES, TAMARIND, NATURAL FLAVOR), SORBIC ACID AS A PRESERVATIVE, MILKFAT, CHEESE CULTURE, OLEORESIN PAPRIKA (COLOR), ANNATTO (COLOR), NATURAL FLAVOR, ENZYMES.

(Translation: the stuff left over when milk coagulates, milk, casein (the dairy stuff that gives you allergies and heart attacks), soy, salt, the stuff responsible for tooth decay, more salt, ground-up mustard, Worcester Sauce, unripe rowan berry juice, milkfat, bacteria and fungi, pepper essence extracted with gasoline byproduct, Achiote tree derivative, “natural flavor”?, enzymes.) There is no cheese.

Fully two-thirds of CHEEZ WHIZ’s calories come from fat. This recipe will provide you with half your daily allowance of sodium from the CHEEZ WHIZ alone (never mind the bacon bits, chopped nuts, crushed crackers, seasoned croutons and crushed potato chips it also calls for).

CHEEZ WHIZ is just one type of "American Cheese," which is not cheese at all, but legally defined as a "cheese analogue" (hence the deliberately fake spelling). If it's called "American Cheese" (any variety) and comes in rectangular form (or in a jar or aerosol can), regardless whether you buy it from the deli counter sliced or not, it most likely grew in a field, rather than came out of a cow. "American cheese" consists mainly of soy and occasionally casein, or milk fats. 

Get this: to encourage patriotism during wartime, the sale and consumption of anything other than "American Cheese"was banned in the US in May, 1942. But people missed their real cheese and knew a ruse when they saw it — the public morale plummeted instead, causing the ban to be rescinded only three months later. 

Kraft has always liked to advertise CHEEZ WHIZ as “cheese made easy,” but what they are doing is making cheese really complicated. Actual cheese is easy all by itself. For a start, you don’t have to add anything to it for it to be cheese. Come to think of it, you don’t need to add anything to broccoli for it to be broccoli either.

Next time you want to disguise the fact you are serving green vegetables by jazzing them up, go with Jizz instead: packed with protein, only 25 calories per average helping.

Actually, skip the veggies altogether. Everyone’s likely to have a better evening. 

Weekday Survival Guide, Kraft General Foods, Inc., 1991

Also from this book: Making A Spectacle Of Yourself
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