Hi everyone.
I’ve just made a keto type meal with a homemade tomato sauce and lots of spinach to accompany some fresh beef meatballs with a little Parmesan to season. I bought the meatballs from a renowned supermarket meat section and thought I’d just check the actual contents of them. Not for one second thinking they were anything more than ground beef and a little seasoning. Well No! Among other things such as rice flour, low and behold SUGAR!
To say I was annoyed and mystified as to why the heck there would possibly be sugar added to them is an understatement!
We had them, but I must say every mouthful was a reluctant one. It was my only meal of a very long and busy day that ended with an hours swim of 54 twenty five metre lengths of the pool. However the next meatball dinner will be with homemade meatballs made with minced beef a little seasoning and maybe a little egg to bind them. Nothing else!
Note to self…… next time prepare in advance. And if going for a quick convenient option, always upon always read the label for contents on the back.
This really does feel like a sugar conspiracy. Unless we are wised up to it we are drip fed it in almost everything we consume. It causes a passive addiction that we are practically unaware of but left wanting more of. Am I being paranoid or is this just all starting to make some sense. Lightbulb 💡 moment maybe ? 🤔.

I am amazed too. Why on earth would any responsible caterer put sugar in meatballs?
Perhaps because it’s cheap, and people addicted will prefer it.

I can imagine that if you have to eat out, watch out for any burger, meatballs etc as they could also have sugar.

I like Subway, as I can get chicken strips in salad. No added sugar, no sauce. Just salad vegetables and grilled chicken.

You are not paranoid. Yes, that is exactly the plan. Its deployment maps exactly to the explosion of obesity and diabetes in the Western diet. Meat products are not exempt. Anything that has been mixed, pre-cooked, cured or in any way processed is in danger of infection. You have to search high and low to find charcuterie that doesn’t have dextrose added as a preservative, even though the whole point of making raw meat into salami and pate’ and prosciutto is to preserve it. Then there are the flavors to worry about — your sweet-n-sours, teriyakis, barbecues, honey mustard — all made out of sugar with a dash of spices.

Your lightbulb is a bright one. Always read the ingredients first, and be on your guard for all the cognates of sugar: dextrose, maltodextrin, barley malt, evaporated cane juice, fruit juice, fruit juice concentrate, anything ending in “ose,” “nectar” or “syrup.”

Egg binds ground beef into meatballs very easily. You can make it even easier on yourself (and use even lean meats like turkey that otherwise would not hold together well) if you make a torpedo shape and flatten it a little. It cooks through very quickly, gets a high proportion of seared exterior and you only have to flip it twice instead of having to deal with browning a sphere on all sides. Add minced mushrooms, green onion or shredded zucchini that you’ve squeezed the water out of to the meat mix for bulk, flavor and moisture.

I don’t think you are paranoid either. –

I watched a brief bit of a TV program last night where a researcher for one of the large processed food manufacturers was talking about the problems with taking palm oil out of pastry. – I must admit it had never occurred to me that they were not using the traditional pastry recipes I grew up with. – I see how hard hit our dairy industry is because they are being pushed to the minimum on the price they get for the milk, so I was taken aback on the talk of how they can’t use butter in pastry in factory produced food because its too expensive. So now they are moving over to a mixture of coconut oil and sunflower oil. – I guess from the manufacturers point of view, if they can shave 0.1 pence off the cost of each meatball, then given the number they will be making a day thats a substantial increase in their profit margin.
There was a TV series that was recently repeated at lunch time on the BBC follow a family through the different changes in diet and associated lifestyle from the 1950’s. I work from home so often have the TV on as a sort of background noise especially when tackling a repetitive task, but one section of this program really caught my attention. It was the very early 60’s when the first breakfast cereals were formulated, and the development of factory based bread making, where chemicals were added to create the sliced white loaf of bread that keeps for a week which we have come to view as standard. That was when they started adding sugar to food, and when the marketing people started to realise that they sold more as a result.
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I do sometimes wonder if the government doesn’t step in and regulate on carb levels simply because of the influence of the manufacturers wanting to safeguard their profits. – Or if it runs deeper. – Apparently there is a dramatic decrease in the percentage of the average weekly wage spent on food now in comparison to the 50’s. Does it suit the government to have a population stuffed with a cheap diet of high carbs (which effects moods) . Most of the traditional times when there has been public uprising in the UK was linked to a sudden cost in food or extra taxation like the turnpike roads which caused the Rebecca Riots because charging tolls on roads to take food to market had a dramatic impact on the cost of living. – But then, does that presuming a level of forward planning that the average modern day politician is now proving themselves to be incapable of?
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The upshot of all this is, that no matter what a burden it will be I can’t see any option in the long term other than having batch baking sessions so that I can have a batch of items in the freezer that I can pop into the oven or on to the hob for a meal where I know what ingredients have been used.