Read All Food Labels. Every Single One.

We avoid processed foods because we've come to the conclusion all those ingredients you can't pronounce aren't very good for our bodies. Our rule is that if man made it, we'll take a pass.

Recently, though, it seems it's more of a challenge to find good, wholesome food. I think some of this is due to skyrocketing food prices. Our local stores, knowing nobody around here is terribly affluent (at least by U.S. standards), tries to keep our food prices low-ish. But in doing so, it seems I must be even more rigorous than usual. Case in point:

We've been buying frozen salmon. I felt good about this because it was sold at a reasonable price, in my opinion, and was wild caught, making it healthy (or so I thought). But after months of eating the salmon, I happened to look a little more closely at the smaller print on the bag. Here's the label, with the important part circled in red:

That's right. Our "healthy," wild caught salmon had an added ingredient! I wish you could have seen my face when I read this, because I was so sad! Go ahead and look up sodium tripolyphosphate. I found it particularly depressing because it's only real use is to make the product look fresher and increase the weight of the fish. Who needs that? Not me!



Thankfully, the next time I went to the store, I found another brand of frozen, wild caught salmon that contained no added ingredients. (Now my face looks happy!)

And now I read ALL labels. Every single one. Because sometimes unlikely foods are processed.