I was eating my lunchtime salad, and on a whim (because it was a chill, blustery day) decided that I’d really like some soup. So I grabbed a can from the cupboard and heated up some Campbell’s tomato soup. I didn’t check the label, because, you know, tomato soup. What would be in it? Tomatoes, broth, maybe some onion, and salt, right?
One sip, and I was shocked to find it tasted sweet.
My first thought was that eating low carb had sensitized me to the taste of sweet, and I guess it has (I’d always perceived Campbell’s tomato soup as salty in the past) but it’s not just that.
After that one spoonful, I looked at the label. A 1/2 cup serving of soup has an astonishing 20 g of carbs, 12 of them from sugar. The number two ingredient is high fructose corn syrup!
I know I shouldn’t find this as surprising as I did. If it’s processed food, of course it’s going to have high fructose corn syrup. I just hadn’t thought of it, because even a week and a half into eating low-carb, I hadn’t needed to get into the habit of checking labels.
Jackie cooks almost all our meals (although I’m cooking a good share of mine, while I’m doing the low-carb thing). We rarely eat processed food, but we keep some on hand so we can satisfy just this sort of sudden urge.
The upshot is that I haven’t had to get in the habit of checking the nutrition labels, because most of what we eat scarcely has labels—because we eat food, not industrially manufactured food-like substances.
I ended up eating about three tablespoons of the soup, and then putting it in the fridge. Maybe we can make some use of it, putting the odd spoonful here and there into some dish that needs a little tomato and little salt—and a little sugar.
Wow! Michael and I have been gradually switching over to eating less processed foods and this might explain why, when he served me a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup last week, I didn’t eat much of my soup. It just didn’t taste very good to me. I have always found Campbell’s soups way too salty. Sounds like we should grow lots of tomatoes this summer and make our own…
Yes, it’s always been way too salty. This was the first time it was also way too sweet.
(Actually, I’ve had this odd hankering for electrolytes since I’ve gone low-carb—everything seems to want salt. That seems to be a common experience—word on the street is that people on low-carb diets need higher levels of potassium and magnesium. Calcium too, although it’s kind of a different category. If you eat any processed food at all, it’s pretty hard to come up short of sodium—but if you eat no processed food and don’t salt things, it would certainly be possible.)
But, yes, growing your own is best, and cooking for yourself—out of ingredients, rather than out of things with an ingredient list.