To expand on the nutritional wasteland offered in most food outlets, I did a bit of a survey.

I recently filled out a questionnaire for a local grocery chain. As a result of wanting to give them information on all departments, I went down all the aisles and looked at the ingredients. I haven't done this much since Atkins years ago had me drop most of the store.

Every so often DH will treat himself with coffee and bakery at a little shop in town. This treat doesn't give him heartburn, which helps him turn down far lesser treats. I know the baker, and he uses fresh fruit, with real butter and sugar and eggs.

That's why the list of ingredients in the bakery section were so long and horrifying. I had to go to the frozen case, with the specialty items, to find the kinds of ingredients at the kind of bakery which is so incredibly rare now.

Yes, even homemade treats were full of carbs and sugar, but now, that's ALL it is. Instead of butter or lard, it's seed oils. Instead of sugar, the even worse HFCS. What once was eggs and milk becomes chemical substitutes. This thing only looked like the stuff of my Midwestern childhood. Even their fruit pies were more like marshmallows floating in Jell-O.

I think you have to be as old as some of us to grasp how enormously our food landscape has changed.