Do you use your food?

This week's Sunday Coupon Rant is brought to you by PediaSure. Peddlers of pediatric poison (oh, I'm sorry, I'll try to not be quite so inflammatory). Did you know they aren't really even a food company? They are Abbott Laboratories Inc. Yeah. Yum.

NutriPals Fruit Bars. They really should put the fruit part in quotes. I'm sure y'all have noticed by now that I have, um... well, rather strong opinions about food and nutrition. For the most part, I leave grown-ups to their own devices. If they want to shovel crap into their mouths, that's their business.
But when they want to shovel it into the mouths of children, it really pisses me off.

"1 full serving of real fruit!"

Yeah... ok... let's take a look... according to their website, which I could not copy/paste (had to type it all up by hand, but I was mad enough to do it):

Fruit paste (strawberry puree, apple juice concentrate, pear and apple puree concentrates, pear juice concentrate, sugar, glycerine, palm oil, corn syrup, rice starch, wheat fiber, malic acid, natural and artificial flavor, pectin, calcium lactate, red 40 lake, sunflower lecithin), soy protein crisps (soy protein isolate, rice flour, tapioca starch, calcium carbonate, malt extract, salt), corn syrup, dehydrated apples, polydextrose, glycerine, high oleic sunflower oil, water, milk protein isolate, fruit pieces (strawberry puree, apple puree and juice concentrates, plum puree concentrate, strawberry and blackcurrant juice concentrates, palm oil, wheat fiber, pectin, natural and artificial flavor), yogurt coating (sugar, palm kernel oil, non fat dry milk, yogurt powder [culture D whey protein concentrate, cultured skim milk, yogurt culture], soy lecithin, salt, natural flavor), less than 2% of the following: toasted oats (oats, sugar, soybean oil, honey, brown sugar molasses), corn maltodextrin, honey, cocoa butter, natural and artificial flavors, xanthan gum, soy lecithin, ... long list of artificial, added vitamins and minerals.

Mmm, red 40 lake... I remember picking that off my Grandma's tree in her backyard... it grew right next to the corn syrup. Aahhh, the memories. Oh, wait!! I see it... "fruit pieces"... there in the puzzlingly-long list...oh, no. Hmmm, pieces of fruit don't have wheat fiber or artificial flavor. As a matter of fact, if the fruit could count as "real", there shouldn't be any parentheses involved at all.

More from their website, the FAQs section:

"Can a child under 1 yr. of age use NutriPals products?"

Use? USE? Do you use your food? I... I... I can't hardly speak/type. The rant is stuck. Almost.

Where are we as humans... what has happened that we are at the point where we use our food products? Shouldn't we be eating our food?

And again... "How should NutriPals Balanced Nutrition Snacks be used?"

Used?!?

I understand why our bottles of shampoo require instructions for use. Somewhere out there, someone was raised by wolves and just-now reintegrated in society, miraculously knowing how to read, but not how to wash his hair. He needs to be told to "lather, rinse, repeat." But since when did we need instructions for our food?

Since we traded it for "food products," I guess. Check your local paper, you could get $1.50 off... hurry, this offer expires soon.