Why is there corn in my cheese?
And why am I getting butter in the mail?
A note: I self published The Lasagna of Sadness as a 52-page paperback – like a ‘90s zine and beautifully photographed recipe book had a food baby. You can buy it worldwide on Amazon. For a good five minutes it was the #8 best selling book in the Gastronomy Essays category! Buy it in Canada | USA.
Probably Worth Sharing is a reader supported publication. Please consider a paid subscription if you want to support my work.
I’ve started ordering butter in the mail.
I know, it sounds crazy. I do a lot of crazy things for food. I understand this about myself: I am a fancy man. I have a fancy kitchen. I like fancy things.
Some people call me bougie, but I think there’s a line between being bougie and caring about the quality of a product. We all draw that line somewhere differently.
I didn’t buy butter by mail because it is bougie. I bought a case (yes, a case!) of St. Brigid’s butter because of its quality. They have a regenerative farm, they have Jersey cows that are grass fed. They are animal welfare certified. Their butter is golden like the sun with 84% fat (most North American butter is 80%). Their butter is soft and creamy – it tastes amazing!
It’s world class butter and it’s made right here in Ontario. (This is not sponsored I just really like good butter and I’ve tried literally every butter available in Ontario. I am a butter diva.)
Butter, like everything else, is so expensive now. If I’m going to pay $10 for butter I’m going to buy the good stuff. You might be inclined to buy the cheap butter, but it’s hard to know what’s in cheap butter, since the dairy industry started feeding cows palm oil to increase milk’s fat content (allowed under Schedule IV, Class 8 of the Canadian Feeds Regulation, 1983).
It’s becoming harder to trust what’s in your food. As food inflation continues to spiral out of control, consumers are changing their buying habits. To cut costs (or increase margin) the big manufacturers are turning to fillers, thickeners, and other additives to reformulate their products. They’re even rebranding them, the same poor quality in fancier packaging, to make them look bougie, so they can charge $10 for butter too.
Even the small stores are guilty of this, where they sell $25 boxes of caramels that are made from corn syrup in a factory. Appearing fancy and being expensive does not mean it’s a quality product.
Is it expensive because it’s a good product? Or is it expensive because it has great marketing and beautiful packaging? Or is it expensive because Galen Weston Jr. chose to price gouge Canadians, leading to Loblaws seeing 58% growth in retail gross profit despite only seeing 17% growth in retail sales while claiming this is a supplier problem only?
Draw your own conclusions from their financial statements:
So how do you know what to buy at the store?
I spent most of my career working in marketing. It’s easy to see through marketing in food: just look at the ingredients. Look for supply chain transparency. Look for corporate ethics.
I am going to share how I buy groceries, to help you focus on the quality of the food you’re buying. You can use this advice at grocery stores big and small. Misleading products are everywhere, even at shops that purport to be about quality but focus on the bougie sameness Faire has created for the world through private equity funded direct-to-consumer brands.
I am not here for the $25 caramels in a fancy box that are made from corn syrup. I am here for quality food made from quality ingredients.
Rage against $18 cream cheese
I like to understand how things work and the systems behind them. I don’t just want to know that a recipe works, I want to know why a recipe works. When I publish a recipe I want it to be repeatable by you (yes, you!) – you may be spending a lot of time and money on these cooking projects. These recipes might be the only new thing you try cooking and I want it to work so you cook more!
Often when a recipe fails in the kitchen the problem is the recipe, not you! But you’re the one who went to three stores to find special ingredients. You’re the one who spent your money on it.
When publishing a new recipe, I usually make it between 3 and 10 times, depending on how often I’ve made it, how much I’ve made it my own, and how often I forget to take good photos (frequently).
I’m currently wrapping up a tiramisu recipe (it will be out in March, it’s amazing). I’m still tweaking the details so I had to make it again this week. I went to buy mascarpone cheese for it this week and it was $17.99 for 475g (1lb).
You might be thinking this is bougie mascarpone – did Marko fly the mascarpone fresh from Italy? You know that’s something I would do, but I did not. This isn’t fancy mascarpone, it isn’t even good mascarpone. It’s Tre Stelle, made from industrially harvested milk from traumatized cows, marked up by Loblaws. Instead of technique or freshness, it’s filled with chemical thickeners and sugars to mimic a traditional food.
Tre Stelle Mascarpone – $17.99 for 475g
Pasteurized Milk And Cream, Maltodextrin, Mono And Diglycerides, Guar Gum, Carrageenan, Carob Bean Gum, Skim Milk Powder, Fructose, Citric Acid, Salt, Potassium Sorbate, Natural Flavour, Calcium Chloride.
Homemade mascarpone – $7.99 for 450g made with grass fed cream
Cream, milk, lemon juice
Why does cream cheese need all these added ingredients? I tried to find another brand, I checked the big stores, the small stores. I asked my local store grocery store what they could order special just for me (there were no additive free options). So after making multiple trips to multiple stores I found there are two brands of mascarpone in all of Waterloo Region I can find without fillers. Saputo at Marche Leos (only sometimes in stock) and Galbani at Vincenzo’s (only sometimes, but Tre Stelle mascarpone is only $14.99 at Vincenzos in case you’re wondering how much Loblaws is ripping you off).
If I can’t find quality mascarpone in my mid-sized city, how can I share a recipe that needs it? And what happens when a recipe goes from a reasonable $15 for a dessert that feeds 12 people to $30+ because the Loblaws chose violence that day?
As I often do, I channeled my anger about the food system into learning how to make something from scratch. I learned that we’re all going to need to make our own cream cheese soon… assuming you can even find pure milk without corn added to it.
Yes, there is corn in milk now!
Corn is ruining everything
In University I took an elective called Eating Local. We had a project about the food system, where we learned how corn is in everything due to agricultural subsidies and how it’s impossible to avoid corn by following a Western diet. One of our projects was a challenge: to go two weeks without eating any corn, which I did by cooking all of my own food and meticulously reading every single ingredient label at the store.
In those 2 weeks I felt better than I did in my whole life before. This is when I learned I had a sensitivity to corn and since then have done my best to eliminate corn from my diet. (This is my experience and may not be true for you.) Corn sneaks its way into everything I eat and since it’s not something that will kill me it’s not the end of the world. It makes me uncomfortable, bloated, and with breakouts all over my body. I often try to re-introduce corn, because I love popcorn, but it rarely goes well. A new meaning for crying snacks.
In cultures that traditionally rely on maize, they use a process called nixtamalization to make corn digestible. Think of it like fermenting wheat or soaking beans with kombu to make it digestible. This is typically done by soaking maize in water with wood ash or with limewater (the mineral lime, calcium hydroxide, not the fruit). Ground maize, cornmeal, can’t form flour. Nixtamalized maize, masa, can. Nixtamlization increases the nutrition and reduces mycotoxins by 97–100%.
But the corn we put in everything is not nixtamalized. It’s chemically modified. Someone from the corn lobby will argue that “all food is chemicals,” which is semantically correct. But there is a large difference between making masa, a process anyone can do at home with ingredients you can buy at the store, and making xanthan gum, which is a patented process. If you try to buy the equipment to make your own xanthan gum you will get you added to a list somewhere.
To make xanthan gum, you:
Industrially grind the corn on Teflon-coated rollers – which may include a variety of other additives that don’t need to be disclosed (such as anti-caking agents)
Remove the starch from the ground corn by soaking it in hydrochloric acid
Remove the acidity by adding adding calcium chloride
Wet grind the mash to further extract any possible sugars
Remove the corn solids, you’re left with very a diluted corn syrup, you may use a variety of chemicals for this such as isopropanol inside a centrifuge
Boil the liquid to evaporate any water – you now have corn syrup! Here’s a patent that explains the process in more detail, on page 2 section 1, or review the lovely diagram here on page 3 – corn syrup ends at step 15, but this also includes the additional 26 steps to turn this from corn syrup into HFCS.
Add the corn syrup to a bioreactor, basically a large fermentation tank, and add the bacteria Xanthomonas Campestris
Allow the bacteria to eat the corn syrup, while agitating it and injecting oxygen – the bacteria create the xanthan gum
Kill the bacteria and separate the xanthan gum from its host by adding isopropyl alcohol and running it through a high speed centrifuge
Use an industrial distilling operation to further separate out the components
Dry it into a powder (more patents for your light weekend reading)
That’s how xanthan gum is made and it’s in almost everything you buy at the store now.
As a component of industrially processed food, xanthan gum acts as a thickener and stabilizing agent. It keeps your salad dressing emulsified, it removes the need for costly processes like actually making cheese. It prevents milk and cream from separating.
It’s allowed to be called natural since the first ingredient in a 45-page long patented process is corn, but like being bougie, where do you draw the line on this being something made by a chemist and something that’s food? This mystery line, starting with real food and manipulating it into oblivion, is also how “natural flavours” are classified.
North American food regulations do not require the component ingredients in processing food into chemical additives to be disclosed (which are otherwise be called “adulterants” when they are added to food). The EU uses the E-number system, which adds some clarity around chemically modified foods. The EU is forced to re-evaluate food safety of these additives regularly. The US is the Wild West, GRAS – “generally regarded as safe” is essentially meaningless and self-regulated. Canada is not much better. These are regulatory problems that require Government solutions, but since we live in an economy built around shareholder capitalism we have palm oil in our butter and corn in our cream.
The FDA issued a warning against the use of xanthan gum in infant formula in 2013 – it was found to increase intestinal inflammation and bacteria infection in infants. The EU’s 2017 safety studies assumed it passed through your body undigested, but a 2022 study in Nature suggests they re-evaluate again because, surprise, that’s false. The study indicates your microbiome adapts to process xanthan gum, allowing at least two novel types of bacteria to thrive in your microbiome.
Xanthan gum isn’t a rare ingredient. You’ll find it in almost everything at the grocery store now. You eat it with almost every meal. Try buying salad dressing at the store without it. It’s nearly impossible to.
There’s a whole underbelly of food adulterants the US and Canada allowed to be added to food, many of which are banned in Europe (Americans, say hi to potassium bromate). Later this year I’ll be writing about food regulations impact flour (tl;dr: buy organic stone ground flour or mill your own like me). Many Canadian grains are banned from import to the EU due to the high glyphosate content (a pesticide component of RoundUp) for non-organic wheat. Roller-mill processed grain in Canada can have over a dozen adulterants added that don’t need to be disclosed, since they are processing agents and not ingredients. The US allows the same list, plus potassium bromate, which is a cancer causing agent. Many scientists believe there is no safe amount to ingest.
Growing up in the 90s, the media narrative was that organic is a sham, it’s for hippies, it’s overpriced marketing with no real benefit. It’s bougie. Well, it turns out that was mostly big industry misinformation to confuse consumers. It’s not bougie, it’s quality.
But why argue for a better world when we can argue with each other?
Corn-free food is better food
Since corn is in everything, and I shouldn’t eat corn, I read the ingredient labels on everything I buy. Corn is in your dairy products – not just as feed for the animals who live in cages where they are fed corn (which they can’t digest without health problems). Corn is used as a sweetener, a thickener, a stabilizer, and a preservative.
I’ve been shopping in this tedious, label reading way for over 15 years now. It makes me an annoying person to shop with. But shopping this way helps me buy better quality food, often for less money.
Is the store brand worse than the big brand, or is it a lower margin, white label version of the premium brand in an uglier box? It’s easy to tell: compare the ingredients – if you see the same ingredients, the same place of manufacture, then it’s the same product in an uglier box for less money. Pocket those savings!
Want to know if the bougie $10 chicken stock is made from, you know, chicken? Read the ingredients. (Sometimes the $3 stock is better.)
Want to know when a company has changed their products to cut costs? Ingredients.
The quality of a food rarely matches its price or packaging. You can get better quality food for less money by looking at the label.
Using corn as our guide, here are some things to look for. You might see corn listed as food, like:
Corn
Corn oil
Cornmeal
Masa
It might be a chemically derived thickener or emulsifier:
Corn starch, food starch, or modified corn/food starch
Xanthan gum
Dextrin or Maltodextrin
It might be a chemically derived sweetener:
Corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, glucose/fructose (disguised corn syrup!)
Dextrose (refined corn syrup that’s more like glucose)
Ethanol
Sorbitol
Malitol
Xylitol
It might be a chemically derived preservative:
“Free fatty acids”
“Tocopherols”
“Alcohol”
Citric acid (though more commonly made from actual citrus)
There are also a wide array of other corn-based chemical additives, such as “caramel colour.” While some of these can be made from other ingredients (glucose is often made from wheat in Europe) none of this needs to be disclosed on an ingredient label, so it’s impossible to know what chemicals they are made from!
Here’s my standard for buying food: would you buy these as ingredients to use in your own cooking? If not, don’t buy it.
Many of these ingredients are shortcuts. They’re used by the food industry to make food faster and cheaper at scale. They’re used to mimic the taste and texture of real food, made from ingredients that claim to be natural but are so far removed from what you would ever make at home.
Lest you think I am out to get Big Corn, corn is often being replaced with other allegedly “natural” ingredients. Marketing people in these big companies are smart, they know corn is seen as a dirty ingredient now. They move to the next additive until it becomes the next bad ingredient of the day (they could instead make real food but that costs money).
Xanthan gum is now being replaced with:
Acacia gum / Arabic gum: can be relatively natural, made from dried tree sap
Guar gum: can be relatively natural, made from ground up seeds
Locust bean gum: to avoid – made from chemically processed carob
Gellan gum: to avoid – bacteria derived like xanthan gum
Carrageenan: to avoid – made from chemically processed seaweed
Cellulose gum/gel/powder: to avoid – made from chemically processed birch bark
Why am I specifying chemically processed? Well, carrageenan is listed as natural, it’s derived from seaweed. It’s made by boiling seaweed in an alkaline solution, such as sodium hydroxide, filtering out the solids, and then purifying it through alcohol precipitation with isopropanol or turning it into a gel with potassium chloride. Carrageenan has been shown to increase the risk for colon cancer and inflammatory bowel disease.
Lastly, when these thickeners are used together they act synergistically, exponentially multiplying their thickening effect to create a super-viscous gel. Does this combination happen in your digestive system, where they get mixed, since they’re in almost everything you eat? That’s not a question that’s been factored into the health and safety studies by organizations like the FDA (USA), CFIA (Canada), or EFSA (EU).
Cream corn
When I realized I couldn’t recommend people buy mascarpone without going to a specialty store, I thought about if I can provide a recipe for it instead. I learned that it is nearly impossible to buy pure cream anymore. Why is there anything but cream in a carton of cream?
Don’t believe me? Go look in your fridge.
Over the past few years, Ultra High Temperature Pasteurization (UHT) has been introduced to keep cream “fresh” on grocery store shelves longer. UHT milk is flash heated to around 290°F–305°F for around 8 seconds. This temperature kills any pathogens but also denatures the milk proteins and changes the sugars – this makes it harder to whip, impossible to turn into cheese, and will cause the milk and cream to separate. To solve these problems the producers add emulsifiers, stabilizers, and sweeteners. The benefit is that UHT cream has a shelf-life up to 12 weeks, which helps the producer and the grocery store’s margins. Unfortunately for you, it goes bad just as quickly once opened.
As a note of comparison, regular pasteurization happens at 150°F for 30 minutes and has a shelf life of around 4 weeks. Since milk proteins denature (irreversibly change) at 158°F, regular pasteurized cream stays whole, whips fine, and can be made into cheese. Like real food.
On the label you’ll seen in tiny print under the nutrition facts – “UHT pasteurized” instead of “Pasteurized” and the ingredients will look like this:
Neilson whipping cream (35%):
Cream, Milk, Carrageenan, Mono- And Diglycerides, Cellulose Gum, Polysorbate 80, Sodium Citrate.
Sealtest whipping cream (35%):
Cream, Milk, Carrageenan, Cellulose gum, Mono and diglycerides, Polysorbate 80.
Lactantia, any of their 35% whipping creams, even the hilariously named and thoroughly modern “old fashioned” whipping cream, share these ingredients:
Cream, Milk, Dextrose, Carrageenan, Mono and diglycerides, Cellulose gum, Polysorbate 80, Sodium Citrate, Sodium Diphosphate
Dairyland (35%):
Cream, Milk, Cellulose gel, Carrageenan, Cellulose gum.
Please note that if you put 10% or 18% cream in your coffee, these ingredients are also in those products from these brands. It’s even in some 2% milk now.
If you’re local to me, you can buy pure cream from:
Hewitt’s cream ($5.39 for 500ml at Full Circle)
Harmony Organic cream ($7.79 for 500ml at Full Circle, Pfennings)
Organic Meadow cream ($8.50 at Pfennings, $7.99 at Zehrs (Loblaws))
The ingredient for these brands is:
Cream
Cream has been just cream since we domesticated cows. Other than increasing profits, why do these adulterants need to be added to cream? Why don’t they need to be disclosed as adulterated cream? Is it bougie to want your milk to just be milk?
One more dairy rant: please don’t by pre-grated cheese. I know it’s convenient, but it’s 50% more expensive – $1.87–$2.50 per 100g compared to $1.28–$2.00 for similar quality brick cheese. Shredded cheese is coated in cellulose powder (another allegedly natural product, which is a chemically processed byproduct of the paper industry) and antifungal preservatives like natamycin, which have still unknown but increasingly scary effects on the microbiome, such as changing how we metabolize glucose.
Also: good luck buying cream cheese, cottage cheese, and increasingly yogurt, without these additives.
How to buy better food
To buy better tasting, better quality food at the grocery store is to take more time – to stop and read the ingredients. Ignore packaging, ignore price in either direction (if you can afford to) and look at the ingredient labels.
You can buy good milk, cheese, and butter from happy cows that live outside – look for animal welfare certified regenerative farms, which is why I now buy butter by mail. These certifications aren’t marketing, they are real. I worked on a regenerative chicken farm for a week last April. I got to see first-hand the life the animals get to live because I took care of them myself.
It’s incredibly uplifting and inspiring.
Regenerative farming is beneficial to the planet and grazing animals help reduce our dependence on fossil-fuel based fertilizers. By feeding cows seaweed we can reduce their methane impact by as much as 95% (seaweed also works for your own methane emissions, the enzyme alpha-galactosidase breaks down fermentable sugars into digestible ones). Regenerative farming, which requires animals, is the past and future of a healthy planet.
I’m also in favour of a plant-forward and vegan diets (those made of actual plants). There are many reasons to move to plant-based alternatives, but if you think the adulteration of dairy is a reason to become vegan, I have bad news for you.
Just like dairy products, the milk alternatives are manipulated to increase profit margin.
Silk Cashew Milk – 25 calories, 0 protein, per 250ml:
Cashew Base (filtered Water, Cashews), Vitamin And Mineral Blend (calcium Carbonate, Zinc Gluconate, Vitamin A Palmitate, Riboflavin (b2), Vitamin D2, Vitamin B12), Sea Salt, Locust Bean Gum, Almond Butter, Sunflower Lecithin, Natural Flavour, Gellan Gum, Ascorbic Acid.
Elmhurst 1925 Cashew Milk – 130 calories, 6g protein, per 250ml:
Filtered water, cashews
For vegan products you must look at the nutrition labels to see if they have protein and fat, and determine where its from. Vegan products (and gluten free products) tend to have the most additives in the whole industry.
Nutritionally you’ll see that Elmhurst as 4–5x the calories – it has 4–5x the cashews! There’s no need for thickeners and oils to create a milk-like texture because it is nutritionally complete. It works, feels, and tastes similar to dairy milk because the nutritional profile is nearly the same. You may need to shake the bottle since the lack of thickeners will allow the water and fat to separate.
For every bad product at the store, there is a good one. This type of comparison is true across the grocery store… except in this one example that makes me so mad.
The terrible state of salad dressing
Salad dressings are the worst. Fat and water like to separate and consumers haven’t wanted to shake bottles since the 90s. Chemical thickeners act like emulsifiers, helping them appear solid. Preservatives help them stay “fresh” for years on the shelf.
So what’s keeping salad dressing together? You guessed it!
Kraft Caesar salad dressing:
Water, Soybean Oil, Parmesan And Romano Cheese (contains Milk), Corn Syrup, Egg Yolks, Vinegar, Sugar, Modified Cornstarch, Salt, Garlic, Spices And Seasonings (contains Wheat, Soy), Anchovy Paste, Lactic Acid (enhances Tartness), Lemon Juice Concentrate, Dried Onions, Natural Flavour, Sorbic Acid (maintains Quality), Xanthan Gum (thickener), Polysorbate 60 (prevents Oil Separation), Dried Garlic, Calcium Disodium Edta (maintains Flavour)
Brianna’s Home Style, a bougie brand:
Canola Oil, Water, Rice Wine Vinegar, Shredded Asiago Cheese, Balsamic Vinegar (wine Vinegar, Concentrated Grape Must, Caramel Colour), Garlic Puree (garlic, Citric Acid), Dried Egg Yolk, Salt, Sugar, Worcestershire Sauce (water, Vinegar, Soy Sauce [water, Salt, Hydrolyzed Soy Protein, Corn Syrup, Caramel Color, Potassium Sorbate], Sugar, Corn Syrup, Tamarind Extract, Caramel Color, Spices, Salt, Dried Garlic, Dried Onion, Citric Acid, Xanthan Gum, Natural Flavors, Celery Seed Oil, Potassium Sorbate), Spices, Dijon Mustard (vinegar, Water, Mustard Seed, Salt, White Wine, Citric Acid, Tartaric Acid, Spices), Natural Flavours, Sodium Benzoate, Xanthan Gum, Mixed Tocopherols
Not very home style, Brianna.
Renee’s would pass my test were it not for the xanthan gum – but you cannot buy a single salad dressing without it at the store:
Canola Oil, Water, Fresh Garlic, Frozen Yolk (egg), Parmesan Cheese (milk), Concentrated Lemon Juice, Seasonings (anchovies [fish]), Salt, Dijon Mustard (water, Mustard Seeds, Vinegar, Salt, Turmeric), Spices, Cured Anchovies (fish), Xanthan Gum
At home, I make Caesar salad dressing with:
Olive oil, egg yolks, anchovies, garlic, Parmesan, lemon, salt and pepper
It takes 5 minutes, you can make it by hand with a whisk or in a blender. Here’s my recipe.
There are good producers
There is still good food out there, lots of it. It does take work to find. This is why I make almost all of my food from scratch. This is why I try to buy organic, regeneratively farmed products directly from the farmers. I love a bougie grocery store, they usually carry these products – but they also carry bougie caramels made with corn syrup, so make sure you read the ingredients no matter how nice the packaging is. And really, you should make your own caramels instead.
Some local farmers:
Regeneratively farmed chicken and eggs: Provenance Farms
Regeneratively farmed beef: Rogers Ranch, McIntosh Farms
Regeneratively farmed butter: St. Brigid’s Creamery (sold by the case)
For milk, cheese, and cream it’s difficult to find 100% grass fed. In Ontario, you can’t legally buy milk directly from the farmer. It must be processed by the Dairy Farmers of Ontario. The following brands have organic products, it’s unclear how much of their winter diet is dried forage vs grain. To be labeled as grass fed, the cows must have a diet of at least 75% grass or forage (fresh or dried).
You can look for:
Organic Meadow (organic grass fed milk and cream variations available)
Rolling Meadow (all organic grass fed milk, up to 10% cream)
Harmony Organic (organic milk, cream)
M-C Dairy (grass fed cheese, butter, and yogurt variations available, as well as 18% and 50% double cream (it’s crazy thick))
Thornloe (all grass fed cheese and butter – no milk)
L’Ancetre (from QC, organic cheese and butter – no milk)
Olympic Dairy (from BC, all grass fed yogurt – no milk, butter, or cheese)
Sadly, Eby Manor, which is beloved locally (I buy their milk often), is not an organic farm and does use pesticides on their grain crops (corn) that they use for indoor feeding. I do appreciate the transparency they offer on their website, as farm transparency is one of the core solutions to this problem.
Farmers should not be embarrassed to have you visit – they should encourage it.
The US being an individualistic society currently has no standards or regulations surrounding grass fed labeling, the rules were rescinded in 2016. It’s self-regulated now, since the freedom from regulation is a greater freedom than your freedom from false labeling, your freedom from cancer, or an animal’s freedom from hunger or cruelty.
If you don’t trust self certification (you’re free not to!) then you need to find third-party certification, such as American Grassfed.
Food is political
If you’ve read all of this and realized how broken our food system is and want to do something about it, here is what I recommend:
In the US and Canada, food laws are regulated at the Federal level. You will need to lobby your member of Parliament (or Congress). Write them a letter in between elections. You can write to the CFIA or FDA. I plan to send this article to my MP, Mike Morrice.
Voter apathy is a problem: In 2022, Ontario’s anti-regulation Conservative party won a majority government with only 43.5% voter turnout. That means only 18% of eligible voters voted for the Conservative Government, yet they have majority control over what does (and doesn’t) get regulated for 5 years. Always vote, get your friends to vote, and work on voter advocacy. Vote like your life depends on it, because it does.
Become an advocate – that’s what I’m doing here!
Talk to store managers and shop owners, ask them if they can carry products that are better quality. Actually buy them if they start to carry them. If you have the budget for it, and it aligns with your morality, invest in the change you want to see in the world.
Your individual purchasing decisions do matter, but this is a systemic problem that must be solved by the Government.
Try to limit shopping at the big, national grocery stores. I would say Google your local independent grocery, but naturally Loblaws has co-opted the term Independent Grocery Store as a brand, to make it difficult for you to find one. Like I said, their marketing teams are very good at their jobs.
If you are in Waterloo Region and want to support an independently owned grocery store, please consider:
Pfennigs Organics (online farmers market – they have ALL the grass fed brands)
The Sustainable Market (online farmers market)
Bailey’s Local Foods (online farmers market)
Herrle’s Country Farm Market (summer only)
If I have missed any, please add them in the comments.
I primarily shop at Legacy Greens. Since I switched fully over to Legacy Greens, I spend half of what I used to spend on groceries at Zehrs (Loblaws) – and I get much higher quality food. The PC Optimum points aren’t worth it.
And since I’ve destroyed your ability to buy cream cheese and salad dressing, here are some recipes to make your own. They only take a few minutes of work each.
Caesar Salad Dressing
Add 4 anchovies, 1–2 cloves of garlic, 2 pasteurized egg yolks, the juice of a lemon, 1 cup of olive oil, 50g freshly grated Parmesan cheese, salt, and pepper to a blender. Blend until smooth and emulsified.
You can also do this by hand by mashing the anchovies with a fork, grating the garlic, and slowly adding the oil while whisking, then add the Parmesan.
Caesar salad dressing is basically mayonnaise with garlic, Parmesan, and anchovies. You can also make it by adding garlic, Parmesan, and anchovies to mayonnaise. Skip the anchovies if you don’t like them.
Keeps for 5 days in the fridge.
I am obligated to tell you to pasteurize your eggs to reduce the risk of salmonella that could be present in raw eggs. If you have a sous-vide, place the eggs in water at 135°F for 75 minutes. Otherwise you can blanch the egg yolks with the lemon juice in a double boiler, whisking constantly, until they reach 160°F on an instant-read thermometer. Allegedly you can find pasteurized eggs at the store, but they probably have corn in them.
Ricotta and cottage cheese
If you’ve never made cheese at home, I am here to tell you that it is 10 minutes of work. You do need a thermometer and cotton cheesecloth, but otherwise all you need is the best additive-free milk you can afford (and have access to), and some white wine vinegar. I recommend watching my YouTube video of this recipe if you plan to make it, at minimum so you can see my handy imaginary thermometer.
All milk in the US and Canada must be pasteurized for sale, which ensures a safe supply chain, but you won’t find success if you use UHT milk for cheese. Look for a label that says Pasteurized not Ultra-High Temperature Pasteurized or UHT. Look for milk and cream without added thickeners, since these can behave erratically at higher temperatures or when introduced to acid, like the lemon juice used in the recipe.
Ingredients:
1L whole milk (2% is also fine)
20ml acid, I prefer white wine vinegar but you can use white vinegar or lemon juice
Method:
Slowly heat your milk to 185°F. It’s important to use a thermometer and stir frequently here to prevent the milk from scorching. Take it slow, if you boil the milk (212°F) then your cheese might not form.
Once you’ve reached 185°F, swirl your stirring spoon to create a vortex and add your acid. Then reverse direction and do 2 figure-8s. Stop stirring. At this point you have cottage cheese!
How to make cottage cheese
If you are making cottage cheese, you can immediately take this off the stove, strain, and then add 1tbsp of cream per 1L of milk you started with.
How to make ricotta cheese
If you are making ricotta cheese, you want to cook the cheese curds for 20 minutes. This helps create the cooked milk flavor similar to a traditional ricotta (ricotta translates to “re-cooked”). Keep the curds and whey between 175°F and 195°F for 20 minutes.
Mascarpone cheese
You can use mascarpone anywhere you would use cream cheese, but I’ve been using it to make tiramisu. What I have learned after several attempts to make mascarpone is that cream cheese and ricotta/cottage cheese are very different, despite appearing very similar. There’s a lot of nuance in the steps.
Online recipes start with just cream, which has never worked for me. By using half milk, half cream, I’ve found it to repeatedly make a thick, creamy cheese. I assume that means half-and-half would work but I haven’t tried it.
Ingredients:
500ml heavy/whipping cream – 35% milk fat (check the ingredients, make sure it’s not UHT – UHT won’t work!)
500ml whole milk (not homogenized or UHT!)
2 tbsp lemon juice (or white wine vinegar)
You need a lint-free cotton kitchen towel or fine (#90) reusable cheesecloth. Regular cheese cloth may not work without at least 6 layers, and a nut milk bag definitely will not work. If you are using a reusable cheesecloth or kitchen towel, boil it for a few minutes before starting to remove any potential pathogens.
Method:
Heat the milk to 185°F, which is just below the simmering point. You want to keep it at 185°F for 3 minutes to ensure the temperature is stable, which will take some fiddling with your stove.
While stirring add the lemon juice. Continue stirring while keeping the heat at 185°F for another 3 minutes. It should not form curds and whey like ricotta, instead it should remain smooth but become thicker and velvety.
If you try to strain it right away it will pour through your cheesecloth like milk. It must cool before your strain. Leave it to cool for 30 minutes, it should thicken to a kefir/yogurt-like consistency. If it’s still very milky, transfer it to the fridge for a few hours before straining.
Layer your cheesecloth in a large sieve or colander inside a bowl. Pour the cooled mascarpone into your cheesecloth. It should pool inside the cheesecloth, not pour through immediately.
The excess whey will drip out over a 3–4 hours in the fridge. If your sieve touches the bottom of your bowl you may need to empty out the whey occasionally. After a few hours it will have a texture closer to cream cheese and you are ready to use it.
Use a spoon or spatula to remove it from the towel and move it to a bowl. This should be relatively easy with a fine cloth, but if you’re using disposable cheesecloth you may want to lay the cloth flat on a baking sheet to scrape as much cheese as you can.
Store in a jar in the fridge. Always use fresh cheese within 2–3 days, it does spoil quickly.
I think making mascarpone is worth the effort – it’s 10 minutes of work, mostly stirring, and some waiting. It saves you $10, it uses better milk, and you don’t need to make a trip to a specialty store (I hope).
Notes on linked scientific papers:
There is a lot of intentional misinformation in the food industry, a lot of fear mongering in the health industry. A lot of anecdotes. There’s big money at play. My hope here is to provide evidenced based science, not conjecture. Where opinions are my personal beliefs, I’ve highlighted those. Elsewhere I’ve tried to link to publicly funded scientific research in credible journals and the NIH.
When looking at scientific studies to determine the health impact of food additives, it’s important to look at who funded and how the study was structured to understand bias. I’m not a researcher or journalist by trade, so I hope I did an adequate job of including those sources here, limiting conjecture, and sticking to the facts of the situation.
You keep popping up in things I read. I'm starting to like you a lot.
Excellent and informative article! Thank you for all the resources, and the deep dive into what’s in our food. I will definitely be sharing this article.