Snowball Effect
They say, “You are what you eat.” Well if that’s the case what happens when you don’t know what you’re eating?
My grandmother-in-law has always had an open kitchen policy (as all good mother-types do) and I have certainly taken advantage. Most of the time the best thing she has for snacks are stale ginger snaps but one lucky day I found something a hundred times more fascinating. Lovingly wrapped in a blanket of cellophane and resting on a cushion of white card stock sat two voluptuous mounds of confectionery lust…pink coconut covered SNOWBALLS!
Understand that this is the type of garbage food that normally causes me to ask, “Who actually buys this stuff?!” Not this time. I pulled out the treat and had it out in moments. I opened my mouth and let my teeth plunge into the thin layer of pink dyed coconut through the marshmallow coating, the dark cake, and finally arrive at the scintillating cream center. Wow! All it needed was a layer of ice cream and a protective coating of Tootsie Roll!
I flipped the wrapper over to look at the nutrition facts (I know, I know). “Huh, this thing expired about two and a half months ago – doesn’t taste like it.”
Mind you, I wasn’t expecting eggs, milk, flour, and sugar but someone would need a masters in organic chemistry to figure out what was in the ever delicio9us (no matter how far past the expiration date) snowball.
Below is the ingredient list EXACTLY as it is printed on the back of the label. Anything in bold I added.
Sugar [surprised?], water, corn syrup [sugar's evil twin brother], enriched bleached wheat flour [uh...you soak a bag of flour in a bucket of bleach and Flintstones?], coconut (sulfite treated) [is that what makes it pink?], partially hydrogenated vegetable and/or animal shortening (soybean, cottonseed, and/or canola oil – beef fat) [beef fat?!], high fructose corn syrup [you like getting high right?], coca, pork gelatin [an organ near the bacon], modified corn starch [modified for your pleasure], glucose [again...sugar], sweet dairy whey, leavenings (sodium acid phrophosphate [you got me], baking soda, monocalcium phosphate [helps prevent a third eye]), mono and diglycerides, soy flour, polysorbate 60 [remember, it's not ice cream], soy lecithin, cornstarch, salt, soy protein isolate, calcium and sodium caseinate [and that is...?], sodium stearoyl lactylate, dextrose, cellulose gum, natural & artificial flavors, potassium sorbate and sorbic acid (to retain freshness). Coating contain: blue (FD&c blue 1 lake, blue 2 lake); green (yellow 5 lake, blue 2 lake); lavender (blue 2 lake, carmine, red 40 lake) [M&Ms and Lucky Charms combined don't have this many colors]; oragne (yellow 6 lake); red (red 40 lake); pink (carmine, red 40 lake); teal (blue 1 lake, yellow 5 lake); yellow (yellow 5 lake). Contains wheat, milk, and soybeans.
I enjoyed the snowball anyway and was caught in the ooy-gooy middle by my grandmother-in-law.
“Oh, so you like those snowballs? I don’t know where that one came from but I’m glad you’re eating it. It’s been sitting in my pantry for a while now and I hate to see food or whatever it is going to waste.”
Since then she has made an effort to bring me snowballs every time she comes to middle Tennessee to visit. Which is great because I wasn’t planning on living forever anyway. Aside from the mysterious ingredients in those delicious snowballs, my only remaining question is, “By how much does each snowball shorten my life or do the sorbates help maintain my freshness?”
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