Xantham Gum?

First of all, because I am either vain or just love the positive reinforcement, I check my blog stats & page views regularly.  How thrilled was I when I saw I now have readers in Canada and China!  Welcome, international friends!  Please feel free to comment with your perspective from a non-American view.

BTW- does that make me stalker-y? Or normal? Or both?

But on to the quandry of the day.  For Fat Tuesday, my boyfriend and I decided to commemorate the holiday by dining on jambalaya.  Beyond the insane number of spices that eventually brought tears to my eyes-- and I am someone who can handle spice-- one of the ingredients required was Worcestershire Sauce.

Worchestershire sauce is just simply delicious, in my opinion, and while at Whole Foods picking up the fresh made andouille sausage, sustainably raised shrimp and other ingredients, we suddenly couldn't remember if I had any or not.  My lovely boyfriend insisted that we killed the bottle in the last recipe that called for it, so we decided to be safe and pick up a new one.  And of course, this being Whole Foods, we found not the traditional Lea & Perrins bottle but the all-natural, organic, etc. bottle of Worcestershire.

Back home I opened up the fridge to find a large, mostly full bottle of Lea & Perrins in the door.  Whoops.  However, I remembered that technically the bottle belonged on my no-no list, due to the existence of, among other things, HFCS.  Who wants to bet that the Lea & Perrins ingredient list across the pond contains HFCS? Any takers?  Yeah, probably not.

Unfortunately, when I stopped to look at the ingredient list of our new Au Naturale bottle, I found a very different set of ingredients that went beyond the lack of HFCS.  One of the items that caught my eye was xantham gum.

I don't know about you, but I see xantham gum and I immediately fear it.  Sorry, I have apparently have a form of food xenophobia.  I think it's the letter "x".  Something about that seems unnatural.  So I did what any responsible au naturale blogger would do: I went to the internets.

It's actually not as scary as one would think.  Xantham gum is a thickener, like corn starch, and also like corn starch it is made from corn- most often from GMO corn, though, which I'm not a fan of. Xantham gum is a great substitute for wheat gluten for those who are gluten intolerant, is used as a binding agent in sauces and ice cream, and is added to gas pumps to improve viscosity of gasoline.  Mmmm... ice cream and gas....

(On a side note- my goodness, will we all turn into large ears of corn? It seems like that stuff is everywhere!  I'm currently reading "The Ominvores Dilemma" so I now have corn on the brain.  But I digress.)

Sadly for me on this quest, questions tend to lead to more questions rather than answers.  Xantham gum is a product of corn, so it's not totally artificial.  But Splenda is supposedly "made from sugar" (nobody has yet been able to explain that to me) and I think that stuff is scary crap.  And both were developed in food labs.  Why do we need to eat things developed in a lab?  Is it necessary? A convenience? An answer to an unknown problem?  It may not do any harm, but I don't know if it's something I want in my body.  I would prefer that I put things in my body that are grown from the earth as-is and not manipulated in a lab.  Amazing how nowadays that seems like a novel concept.

I don't know the answers to those questions, and don't expect anyone else to answer them for me.  It does remind me that my to-do list includes making a big batch of homemade condiments, which I may do in a few weeks when I'm not traveling on weekends for work. For the record, the organic worcestershire sauce wasn't that good so that's definitely at the top of my list.  It also reminds me that I should start delving even more into an exploration of how food labels are created and the regulations that go into them: "natural flavors", anyone?  But again, I digress.

On a happier tangent, though... I just bought tickets to the Family Farmed EXPO in a few weeks... I have a giddy feeling like I just bought concert tickets!  Local farms, booths, cooking demonstrations, workshops from everything on how to make your own cheese to urban farming to raising chickens (no, I don't plan on doing that).  So excited!  Check it out at http://www.familyfarmedexpo.com/ and if you're in Chicago, let me know if you plan to go!  I'm sure I will be blogging fast and furiously after the day is over.