What A Slacker!

Spam - Meat not Mail

Add comment December 6th, 2008

SPAM the all American canned meat has gotten a bad wrap over the years and a lot of people feel the same way Month Python’s Flying Circus does, Spam, Spam, Spam I bloody hate Spam. Well not me, I kind of like it and lucky for me it appears to be soy free according to the ole ingredients list. One would almost expect that this potted mystery wheat would use soybean as a filter I, for one, am glad they do not. This is a bit of comfort food for me; It takes me back to my childhood and eating a fried Spam sandwich with my Daddy. I have had a can in the cupboard for a couple of years good thing Spam has a good shelf life mine is good until 2010, I’ll have to fry it up one of these days.

Here’s little SPAM Trivia, did you know Hawaii holds a Spam festival each year? They do.

Soy in my Tuna

Add comment December 5th, 2008

Why are there soybeans in my Tuna? Good question isn’t it? When I pick up a can of solid white tuna in water that’s what I expect to get. But you will also get soy beans. The ingredients of Starkist Solid White Albacore Tuna in water are listed as: White tuna, water, vegetable broth, salt, phosphate, with The warning contains Fish and soybeans. Well The fish is a given (and supposedly salmon and tuna are the only ones I can have now), but where is that soybean warning coming from? The vegetable broth, which apparently doesn’t even need to be there as my call to StarKist to complain proved. So along with natural flavors watch out for anything listing vegetable broth!

I called to complain to Starkist that in water should mean in water and to ask if any of their tuna was soy free. They do have a premium Gourmet Choice tuna that is soy free. It is pretty much the exact same as the regular White tuna just no osy, a gold label, half ounce less all for about a dollar more. They sent me a coupon to try it.

The ingredients of the StarKist Gourmet Choice Solid White Albacore Tuna Fillet (gold can) are: white meat tuna, water, salt, sodium acid phosphate with the warning that it contains fish (nothing about being manufactured in a facility that handles soybeans). So this time in water means in water.

Bumble Bee also makes a Prime fillet Solid White Albacore in water (in a gold can) that is soybean free (no vegetable broth). The Bumble Bee Tuna is less expensive and has six ounces to Starkist’s 4.5 oz. We will see which one tastes better.

Soy Free Mayo Found

Add comment December 4th, 2008

The soy free Mayo Search may have ended. I think I have found the answer to mayonnaise problem (kind of). Thanks to all the people over at topix for answering some one else’s question it sure helped me.

Spectrum Naturals makes a Canola Mayonnaise that unlike Hellmann’s Canola mayonnaise truly is soy free. And it saves me from making my own. The whole raw eggs thing had me freaked what if I poisoned myself? But if I made it I could leave out the mustard (another allergen for me albeit a lesser of two evils for now).

Spectrum Naturals Canola mayonnaise ingredients expeller pressed canola oil, pasteurized whole eggs, filtered water, honey, distilled white vinegar, sea salt, mustard (distilled vinegar, water, mustard seed Salt), lemon juice concentrate, (warnings) Contains Eggs.

Haven’t tasted it yet, I hope it is good as it is answer to my prayers so-to-speak. Only problem is the price a small jar was almost six bucks. Plus I had to go into a health food store to get it. No I’m not afraid of hippies, it’s just everything and I do mean everything in there seems to contain soy in one form or another, The entire refrigerated section was completely soy. As I have said before — soy equals death to me. Not that my soy (or peanut for that matter) allergy is air borne it’s just such Close proximity to so much soy bothered me. I’m actually surprised they had this mayo there since vegans and vegetarians all seem to think Soy protein is a saving grace, it’s not. The only place for soybean oil is in gas tanks not our foods. The use of it in foods will only increase the number of people who become allergic to Soy. Think about it. In a way we are poisoning ourselves ever so slowly, I’ll try my new Mayo when I make my next Tuna sandwich.

The Great Margarine Butter Debate

Add comment December 2nd, 2008

All my life I have been told that margarine is better for you than butter. Maybe it is, but since my Soy allergy has kicked into full gear (it could potentially kill me) butter is the safest choice for me. Margarine like mayo is all made from soybean oil. Even if it says canola it only means with Canola the mass majority of the oil will be soybean oil. So I have abandoned margarine in my diet and have gone over to the buttery side of life. Taste has improved, but butter is hard unless you get the whipped butter. Like every thing else soy free butter is more expensive and to remain Soy free you have to stick with the brand names. Generics will slip in Cheaper bad for you ingredients.

I have found a pretty good solution to spread on my homemade bread (need to ask my mom to make me a loaf). My solution is Country Crock’s spreadable butter with Canola Oil. It was easily found in my grocer, no driving all over god’s creation to find it. It spreads easily and tastes good too,

Ingredients: Butter (cream, salt), canola oil, buttermilk, water, salt, lactic acid, Vitamin A

New favorite snack pickles

Add comment November 30th, 2008

Good old Vlasic pickles have been my favorite snack of late but I am apparently going to have to cut the kosher Dill spears out. Guess I did not read the ingredients list carefully enough. I really do need to be more diligent when it comes to reading labels. Smack in the middle of the list
is the dreaded “natural flavors”. Why on earth would pickets need additional flavors?

Looks like my Bread and Butter chips should be fine, I’ll just leave the Kosher dill for everyone else. Might explain my nausea of a few weeks ago when I would come home and grab a dill spear as a snack before my meals.

Vlasic kosher Dill Spears ingredients: Cucumbers, Water, distilled vinegar, salt, calcium Chloride, poly sorbets 80, natural flavors, Yellow 5.

Only 5 calories a pickle spear if you can eat them.

Vlasic Bread & Butter chips ingredients: Cucumbers, high fructose Corn syrup, water, distilled vinegar, corn syrup, salt, spice, Calcium Chloride, Yellow 5

Calories 25 for about 3 chips. 100-calorie snack would be about 12 pickle chips. I don’t think I could eat that many at one time. But they do make a nice side to my tuna sandwiches, (which are not completely soy free thanks to the bread).

The Spaghetti Dilemma

Add comment November 28th, 2008

Well having a soy free spaghetti dinner is almost impossible. We normally make our own spaghetti sauce but we use store bought ingredients. Our recipe is simple enough meat, spices, tomato paste, tomato sauce, diced tomatoes and olive oil, sound s like it should be soy free right? Well that tomato sauce is the problem. Right now the only brand we have in the house (generic Giant brand)
has natural flavors listed. And we all know by now natural flavors equals soy. I will call to confirm, but I am sure it does. So the hunt begins for a canned tomato sauce without soy.

So far my noodles all seem Okay (wheat is not an issue for me - yet), I am concerned by the wheat gluten in the Giant brand, but San Giorgio and Barilla both seem to list better ingredients and no sign of Soy floor or soy oil. Yeah.

Giant Brand Vermicelli ingredients: semolina, niacin, ferrous solfate (iron), thiamine, thiamine Mono nitrate, riboflavin, folic acid. (warnings) Contains: wheat gluten (Food hold USA)

Barilla whole Grain spaghetti the ingredients: whole durum wheat flour, semolina, durum Wheat floor, oat fibe r. (warnings) Contains: wheat ingredients, manufactured on equipment that process products containing eggs, (Barilla America, Inc)

San Giorgio Angel Hair Pasta ingredients: semolina (wheat), durum flour (wheat), niacin, iron (ferrous sulfate), thiamn Mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid. (warnings) Allergen information: contains wheat and is manufactured in a facility that uses eggs.

So the noodles appear To be mostly harmless as does my parmesan cheese.

Giant Brand Parmesan Cheese: parmesan Cheese made from Cow’s milk (Cheese Culture, salt enzymes), powdered cellulose (prevents caking) (warnings) contains milk

My problem again lies with the sauce whether we make it ourselves or buy a jar for quick and easy meals. (I am learning there is no longer a quick and easy meal for some one with allergies or even for anyone wishing to eat healthier meals).

Ragu 100% Natural (doesn’t mean it is good for you) ingredients: Tomato puree (water, tomato paste), soybean oil, salt, sugar, dried onions, extra virgin olive oil (EVOO), spices, romano cheese (part-skim milk, Cheese Cultures, salt, enzymes), natural flavors,

No warnings as the FDA does not require soy warnings only that they are listed in the ingredients, but they can still get away with using natural flavors (aka Soy).

Ragu is a sauce I grew up with and my preferred sauce, but I’ll now have to say good-bye. Not buying it any more is a lot easier than trying to get a company to
stop using soy. So I tried Prego. Flavors okay, but I am not 100% certain it is soy free, I’ll have to call Campbell’s and find out.

Prego 100% Natural Italian sauce ingredients: tomato puree (water, tomato paste), dice tomatoes in tomato juice, sugar, vegetable oil (corn and or Canola), salt, Onion powder, spices (basiI, oregano, spice), dehydrated garlic, citric acid, dehydrated parsley and flavoring. (no warnings)

I question the flavoring and spices listings. I have found some spice mixes in my cupboard that contain soy.

Unless I want just noodles, olive Oil and parmesan cheese my search for Soy free spaghetti the sauce continues.

Is There Soy In Coke

Add comment November 25th, 2008

Trying to live a soy free lifestyle is hard. Much harder than one would think. (Sorry but since this affects my every waking moment you’ll see a lot of soy posts on this blog.) As I had learned from my search for Mayo when an ingredients list says “natural flavors” it is really saying soy. Take a good hard look at the ingredients list on any product you are bound to see the phrase natural flavors.

The worst part is that even with soy being one of the top allergens (even deadly like peanuts) The FDA in their infinite wisdom (sarcasm in case you don’t get it) says only certain soy proteins are the problem so manufacturers don’t need to list them on the labels. Leaving us all exposed to soy in other forms, which as I can attest can be almost as bad as straight soy protein. Okay so each form of soy can affect me differently all forms still make me feel like crap. So it really annoys me when you call a company like Coca-cola to find out if the natural flavors listed on their cans of Coke are at all soy based and all they do is read off a company statement saying what kinds of soy they are required to list. They will not give you a straight answer telling you that it is proprietary information, so the Coke recipe is so secret they would rather make people sick or even kill them than admit whether or not natural flavors are at all soy based. Once I spoke with a supervisor she at least came back to me with an answer of no soy in the natural flavors, but do I believe them or simply cut all Coke products out of my life for good?

The Marvelous Marvel Ranch

Add comment October 18th, 2008

We recently discovered a little restaurant in the middle of town called the Marvel Ranch. It is at 4th and Penn in downtown Reading. We have been driving by this place for twenty odd years and thought it was a closed down dive. Well it isn’t either of those things.

The outside does present itself as a dive and perhaps the inside isn’t much better, but the food is good and inexpensive. It has a homey feel like Mel’s in Alice’s Restaurant. (We haven’t gone in enough times to know if The Marvel Ranch has its own version of Flo or not. But the locals and regulars add plenty of color and character to the overall atmosphere even without a Flo in the mix.)

The hours at the Marvel are a bit odd (this is why we assumed it was no longer in business). They open real early to catch the folks heading off to work something like 5:30 or 6: 00 (you won’ t catch me up that early). Then close around I:00 pm and 12:00pm on Sundays. You can get their entire menu at any time. So if you want a burger at 6 am you can get it or if you want the Marvel Mess at noon you can get that too. What is the Marvel Mess? It is an omelet that is pretty much a Marvel Ranch exclusive. It includes scrambled eggs, cheese, potatoes, ham, onions, and peppers all served up in a heap on your plate for only a few dollars. The also serve a smaller portion called the mini marvel mess. A stack of 3 pancakes is under 3 dollars.

Next time you find yourself in Reading in the morning looking for a good place for breakfast or an early lunch check out this hidden treasure that’s just across the Penn Street bridge. You’ll be pleasantly surprised. I know we were.

Bitching About Soy In Every Thing

Add comment October 6th, 2008

Trying to live a soy free life is proving harder than one would think. Soy is one of the nine top recognized allergens. So why is it being used in everything? We stopped peanuts in schools and California makes laws against restaurants using Trans fats, but no one seems to care that we are basically causing an epidemic of food allergies by subjecting everyone to repeated ingesting of a top allergen. We need food manufactures to find an alternative to putting soy-based ingredients in all their products.

Allergy Test Results

Add comment October 5th, 2008

I recently had additional tests for food allergies. I am getting worse. I had already known of my celery, carrot, and peanut allergies, but the list is a lot longer now. It now includes soy, hazelnuts (actually we can say all tree nuts), Brazil nuts, almonds (like I said we can just write off all nuts), seafood (shellfish and regular fish), apples (raw and cooked), celery (raw and cooked), carrots (raw and Cooked), bananas, cherries, mustard, and a slew of other things.

The things that will hurt me the most are soy, celery and carrots. All three of these already cause my throat to close. So now I have an eppy pen just in case. I am trying to stay away from everything because food allergies only get worse. There are no shots to get better from food allergies.

My biggest hurtle is the soy. It is in every thing, absolutely every thing. Supposedly some forms of soy are okay but they aren’t really. If someone tries to tell you that something doesn’t have the right kind of soy protein in it to be a problem don’t chance it. I recently read about 4 deaths in Sweden caused by hidden sources of soy. And I am personally affected by even small amounts of soy oil such as that found in soft drinks like Mountain Dew and Fanta (although Coke tells me it won’t hurt me and will not respond to my emails that it does). The reaction I get from this type of soy is in mild compared to when I drink soy milk (which I haven’t done since the first time I tried it), but it does affect me causing mucus in my throat and other throat irritation, too. Soy oil is in just about everything. It is proving to be very difficult to stay away from that’s for sure.

Folks at Hellmanns Not Too Bright

Add comment October 2nd, 2008

Now I am not saying the folks at Hellmann’s are idiots, but then again maybe I am. As I said in my last mayo post that I have been searching for a VERY long time for a soy free mayonnaise and I thought I found it in the Hellmann’s brand Canola mayonnaise especially since their label did not mention there was soy in the product. So I bought it. Only to learn from their website that it does indeed have soy in it. They list natural flavors on the bottle label but explain on the web with parenthesis that natural flavors equals (soy)!

I asked them why the  product did not mention this but rather hid it and they sent me a form letter back which did not address my question about their product label.

Compare their website info against the actual product.

Here is the form letter they sent me:

Thanks so much for writing!

Hellmann’s real mayonnaise has been made with soybean oil since the 1950’s. It was, however, listed on the label as vegetable oil. In July 1979, new FDA labeling regulations became effective and required each type of oil to be declared by name. Therefore, since then, we have listed soybean oil as an ingredient in Hellmann’s mayonnaise and other dressings.

Thanks for your interest!
Your friends at Hellmann’s

Halloween Nerds

Add comment September 30th, 2008

I mean the Nerds candy not the geeky guys knocking on the door. Wonka Nerds have four Halloween candies each in its own test tube topped with a scary monster. The Mummy Makeover is filled with white Nerds, which are fruit punch flavored, but taste a lot like Smarties (remember Smarties?). Then there’s Werewolf Morph wildberry, Vampire Vaccine cherry, and Bat Bite Antidote grape.

They are made by Nestle and can be found in the candy or Halloween aisles. Price ranges from $.99 to $1.99 each. Nerds fans will like these.

Monster toy collectors like myself might find the toppers a little disappointing. They do not really lend themselves to easy display within a collection.

Is There a Soy Free Mayo? No Way-O.

1 comment September 26th, 2008

I cannot tell you how hard it is to live a soy free life. Even when your life depends on it.

Two years ago I discovered I was allergic to soy when my Dad gave me a glass of Silk Chocolate soy milk. I really liked the taste, but by the end of the glass my voice was changing and my throat was closing. That was the beginning of the end as far as being able to eat what I want or what I like. Soy is in just about everything from Mountain dew to bread.

At first I just stayed away from the obvious sources like soy milk, protein bars (well anything with protein in the name), tofu and anything in the SoyJoy line. But that wasn’t enough. This year when I was tested again my allergy to soy had increased. So I am now reading all labels (which makes grocery shopping take a very long time) in search of soy free foods. This is not an easy task. If I was a dog it would be easy to find soy free foods, but as a human nearly all food contains soy of some type.

All I ask is for a commercial mayonnaise to be made without any soybean oil or soy source at all. I thought I found one with Hellmann’s Canola Mayo, but unfortunately is has soy in it. The ingredients list on the product itself does not say is has soy, which is why I thought it was soy free (and apparently so do a lot of people – do a search). But Hellmanns.com list the complete ingredients and the natural flavors come from SOY! You have to be leery of those hidden forms of soy that manufacturers feel they don’t have to list on the product itself. I was so excited when I first discovered this product, which has since been replaced with even more disappointment.

Hellmann’s® Canola Cholesterol Free Mayonnaise ingredients as listed on their website:

INGREDIENTS: WATER, CANOLA OIL**, VINEGAR, MODIFIED CORN STARCH**, WHOLE EGGS AND EGG YOLKS+, SUGAR, SALT, LEMON JUICE, XANTHAN GUM**, (SORBIC ACID**, CALCIUM DISODIUM EDTA) USED TO PROTECT QUALITY, DL ALPHA TOCOPHEROL ACETATE (VITAMIN E), PHOSPHORIC ACID**, NATURAL FLAVORS (SOY), BETA CAROTENE** (FOR COLOR), CITRIC ACID**, OLEORESIN PAPRIKA, PHYTONADIONE (VITAMIN K).
** INGREDIENT NOT IN MAYONNAISE
+ ADDS A TRIVIAL AMOUNT OF CHOLESTEROL

Guess I’ll have to try making my own soy free mayo. Problem with making my own is all the mayonnasie recipes I found have mustard in them. I am allergic to mustard as well.