"packaged foods" news and stories

When they first hit the mainstream, I was totally in favor of baby carrots. It happened sometime during my high school years and I remember being able to buy a turkey sandwich on a bagel and a small bag of baby carrots from the cafeteria for $1.50. It felt like a huge bargain and it gave me the sense that I was eating a fairly healthy meal, since nothing in my lunch had taken a trip through the deep fryer that the cafeteria workers loved so much.

Friday night I was at my local Acme, and I came across pre-packaged pineapple wedges, orange slices and grapes, pre-plucked from their stems. They were all packed in a plastic tray, which was then wrapped in cellophane. They came in four-packs, so the wrapped trays were then swathed again in an additional layer of cellophane, to keep them bundled together. I blame baby carrots for these overly packaged fruits, as they were the first product that made us accustomed to ready-to-eat produce.

I think we've gone too far. I know that people claim that these products increase the amount of fruits and vegetables that people eat, but how hard is it to slice an orange yourself? I know that fresh pineapple is a pain to cut, but if you don't want to trouble yourself with the minutia of taking it apart yourself, you can buy yourself a gadget that will do it in seconds.

What do you guys think about the pre-cut, pre-packaged fruit and vegetable trend?

You had to work late. The traffic on the commute home was horrible. You're tired. You're hungry. But you've got to get dinner for the family on the table now. What do you do?

You could resort to picking up a bucket from the Colonel on your way home, or call for pizza delivery, but you're better than that, right? Apparently, you are, according to a study by UCLA's Center on Everyday Lives of Families that did the first academic study to track American families moment by moment as they make dinner. They had expected to see a lot more takeout in working families but what they really saw was that 70% of the households in the study cooked at home. However, these "home-cooked" meals heavy reliance on "convenience foods."

However, these convenience foods, things that augment home cooking, didn't necessarily make dinner preparation any faster or easier. In fact, the difference in time to prepare dinner between a household that relied on convenience foods like boxed mixes, packaged vegetables, and pre-made stirfries and a household that made everything from scratch, was not statistically significant.

Really? You mean all this time I've been using Hamburger Helper, and I could have made lasagna from scratch in the same amount of time?!?!

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In case some of you aren't aware, super mega store Target has its own line of grocery store products, Archer Farms. If you think about it, Archer Farms is just a fancy rooster sticker on the generic white store brand, but that is beside the point. The point is that though I knew about Archer Farms, and though I go to Target on a regular basis for "stuff," I never actually stopped to try any of their foods. The only thing I ever eat from Target is pizza from Pizza Hut because really now, I could never, in good conscience, eat Pizza Hut outside of a discount superstore.

This week, my Slashfoodie friends, it is "Sarah Tries a Lot of Foods From Target and Blogs About It!" Week because I somehow found myself with all kinds of "rare and wondrous foods" from Archer Farms ("rare and wondrous" are their words, not mine) in my pantry and my countertop.

First up, it's the Chocolate Chip Petite Cookies -- "rare and wondrous" indeed!

AdJab just posted a great list of their top eight male mascots in the advertising world, and poking around over there, I noticed that all of them, with the exception of Mr. Clean, are from food products. Guess that goes to show how important branding, marketing, and advertising are to consumer-packaged foods.

AdJab picks Orville Redenbacher, Sonny the Cuckoo Bird (cuckoo for CoCo Puffs!), Snap, Crackle and Pop! (they come as a package deal), Charlie the Starkist Tuna, Sugar Bear, Hamburger Helper Hand (which always freaked me out because he doesn't have five fingers), and Colonel Sanders.

Who are the food mascot "men" you remember?

Tired of sandwiches that get mushy and soggy from the filling soaking in the bread? Most people have learned to avoid this by packing their fillings - such as tuna or sauces - on the side and assembling the sandwich immediately before eating. This technique doesn't work with preassembled, prepacked sandwiches, of the variety found in refrigerated cases at grocery and convenience stores. While I prefer to avoid this type of food, others have worked to turn them into non-soggy lunchtime options. Diana's Homegrown has patented a pull-out pouch system that keeps the filling separate from the bread.

This is a great idea until the reality sinks in that your convenience store sandwich may have been stored for quite some time before you purchased it. In fact, CNN said, "The technology extends the lifespan of an unrefrigerated sandwich by as much as a month." Sandwiches should not last this long. No bread that is worth eating should last this long completely undamaged, even if it is kept "fresh" by refrigeration. This presents an opportunity for another company to sell packaged sandwiched fillings in a wide variety of flavors - which is a great idea - and to let the consumers provide their own bread.

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