"HFCS" news and stories

The battle over sweeteners just got a whole lot more bitter.

As the Associated Press reports, a group of sugar farmers and refiners, including big names like C&H Sugar, have filed suit against the makers of high-fructose corn syrup. Their beef? They want the corn industry to stop trying to hawk their souped-up sweetener as "corn sugar."

As the country has watched its collective waistline get bigger and a generation of kids turn into outsized roly-polys, perhaps no product has come to be as maligned as high-fructose corn syrup. Indeed, among certain members of the Bugaboo-stroller set, feeding your kids anything that contains the super sweetener might as well be the equivalent of letting them snack on crack.

Faced with an image crisis (American consumption of high-fructose corn syrup fell to a 20-year low last year), the corn industry went on the offense, running golden-hued ads of bucolic American farmscapes that essentially touted high-fructose corn syrup as nutritionally the same as sugar and asking the federal government for permission to market the stuff accordingly as "corn sugar."

It's probably debatable which is worse for you-artery clogging trans-fats or fat-producing empty calories from high-fructose corn syrup. But one thing is clear: Both of these toxic ingredients, which are found in almost all mass-produced foods on the market today, are harmful to your health. In a hilarious Saturday Night Live spoof this weekend, we find out why-it makes you fat, fat, fat. But the best part of the fake commercial is the satirizing of the real ad from the Corn Refiners Association.

In the spoof, one mom is surprised to find another mom serving Juicy Drink at a kid's party. After pointing out that's it contains HFCS, she says: "You know the things they say about HFCS." The other mom replies: "Like what? That's it's made with corn, it's natural enough, and, like sugar, it's fine in moderation." Trouble is, that's almost exactly what the real commercial says, and that's all one big corn-fed lie.

Controversy is brewing this month in the mommy blogosphere over high-fructose corn syrup, after the website Mom Central, a marketing consulting group that arranges blog tours, launched a campaign on behalf of the Corn Refiners Association (CRA). Mom bloggers were lured by $50 gift cards and the opportunity to participate in a webinar led by paid consultants in exchange for creating HFCS-focused content that reflected typical CRA talking points. Mom Central's own website published plenty of pro-HFCS content as well.

Sara Reistad-Long and Camille Noe Pagán. Photo: JP Pagán

We caught up with Pagán to chat about her dislike of food "fanaticism," the evils of high-fructose corn syrup and how she not only has her steak, but eats it too.

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People who like food. We are speaking to a more general audience, male and female. People who read Gourmet, but might read Fitness, too. People who are really interested in food and their health.

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In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.

When my mother, who had been raised on kosher half-sour pickles, first tried bread-and-butters, she was immediately overwhelmed. For someone who was used to the tart flavor of Northeastern dills and half-sours, the Southern sweetness of the bread-and-butters were an absolute delight.

Through a combination of compliments and guile, she managed to get hold of our friend Millie's recipe. From that year on, we had a huge picklefest every summer, when we'd spend two or three days putting up bread-and-butter pickles.

While these are extremely sweet pickles, I have kept the recipe almost exactly the way my mom made it. This is partly due to the necessities of pickling, and partially due to a sense of tradition. Mostly, though, it's due to the fact that I regularly swap these pickles out for gherkins or sweet pickle relish.

Get the recipe for bread-and-butter pickles after the jump.