Saturday, January 07, 2006

a tale of two snacks

My friends all know that I am a fan of fritos. After years maligning them because of their fat content, I have come back. One thing I love about fritos is their simplicity. What follows is a comparison of the ingredients of two frito-lay products: fritos and cheetos.


FritosCheetos
INGREDIENTS: WHOLE CORN, CORN OIL, SALTIngredients: Enriched Corn Meal (Corn Meal, Ferrous Sulfate, Niacin, Thiamin Mononitrate, Riboflavin, and Folic Acid), Vegetable Oil (Contains One or More of the Following: Corn, Soybean, or Sunflower Oil), Whey, Salt, Cheddar Cheese (Cultured Milk, Salt, Enzymes), Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Maltodextrin, Disodium Phosphate, Sour Cream (Cultured Cream, Nonfat Milk), Artificial Flavor, Monosodium Glutamate, Lactic Acid, Artificial Colors (Including Yellow 6), and Citric Acid

 

Two snacks, one maker.

Which is better?

Which is simpler, and which more complex?

Which is more reliant on the goodness of God, and which on man's wisdom?

Cheetos has a a commercial, a slogan ("Dangerously Cheesy" ®), and even a mascot. I don't think I have ever seen Fritos commercial. People continue to hunger for them because they are good. They continue to be a household name throughout generations. Yes, I am a Fritos fan.

And yet, I wonder. You read the Cheetos ingredients and see all those B vitamins (Niacin, Thiamin, Folic Acid) they've added in the "enriching" process (any time you see enriched, beware—that mostly means that they ruined the natural grain during some process so they have to enrich it to get it back to something somewhat nutritious), and you see that it even has Vitamin C (citric acid). And they were considerate enough to take the natural fat out of the milk before they added it. Maybe a lot of folks actually think that Cheetos are better after all that people have done to "enrich" it.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

The Mythical Mr. Boo loves vitamin C when he's sick, especially in the orange juice that he mixes with his vodka.

Jon said...

ADM, Cargill and the like have made their millions by creating hugely complicated fractionation processes for corn and soybeans, and selling the fractions (protein, oil, etc.) back to the world in huge volumes. What is the result?

We're getting smarter, but only because of all the health studies being done on the effects of mega-doses of fractionated ingredients on rats.

We should be the healthiest people on the planet. Heh.

Hexane-extracted defatted soy flour, high fructose corn syrup, soy protein isolate, partially hydrogenated oils (crisco), instantized lecithin, trans fats, isoflavones. Mmmmm. Yummy.

Our collective dash lights are going off, but we keep looking for answers from the very people who created the problem. Magic bullets don't work. Sophistication does not work.

Simple is Godly.

Steve Coan said...

Yeah, what is it about the modern age that we have to "reduce" everything? Yancey talked about this reductionism that has infected our entire world in Rumors of Another World. It's like we're not happy unless we can break something down into small parts that we can study, categorize, index, and determine if they in that form are useful for our own devices.

Rather than accepting the beauty of a flower as it is, we have to dissect it and inspect it under a microsope. Rather than appreciating the beauty of a sunset, we have to do a spectrum analysis. Rather than glorying in a woman, we have to understand that she's "from Venus" and what makes her tick; we have to make her into a flowchart so she is predictable (and useful). But the goodness of a flower is not under a microsope; the goodness of a sunset is not in a telescope, nor is the goodness of a woman in a book. Their goodness is plain if they are simply appreciated.

Goodness is not known through reducing something, whether grains or people or anything in creation. There is a tendency in mankind to want to make everything smaller so they can consume the parts they want of it, and even refashion them—whether philosophy, God, even people—rather than accepting them as they are.

It always bothers me when people start talking about secrets because it reminds me of this reductionism, the idea that the truth of something is hidden inside of it, and we must rip it open to understand it. The tragedy is that of the goose with the golden eggs. And it's not the way God reveals Himself. He is eager to reveal Himself. Jesus said, “The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. This is why I speak to them in parables."

If you accept God and His creation as is, and give glory to Him for it, then He will fill you up with all the secrets you could ever want. If you think you will piece goodness together like a mosaic by digging up secrets in science or in Bible study, you will be "ever hearing but never understanding" and "ever seeing but never perceiving". God has made goodness plain. If you cannot accept Him as a whole, any parts you break off will be dead.

Paul wrote this to the Romans in the first century:

The basic reality of God is plain enough. Open your eyes and there it is! By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can't see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being. So nobody has a good excuse. What happened was this: People knew God perfectly well, but when they didn't treat him like God, refusing to worship him, they trivialized themselves into silliness and confusion so that there was neither sense nor direction left in their lives. They pretended to know it all, but were illiterate regarding life. They traded the glory of God who holds the whole world in his hands for cheap figurines you can buy at any roadside stand. (Romans 1)

Has anything changed in two thousand years?

Maybe. Maybe now we are more adept at rejecting goodness from all the methods we have refined for ripping things apart.

This song is resonating with me. It's in my heart and has found my voice. I admit to being a Christina Perry fan. I've been known to...