Does this look like the best way to start the day?
How was day 1? Did any of you try a new recipe yesterday? Myself, I made a great dish of fresh linguisa sausage with kale and red onions. Simple and delicious.
In case you are mourning the loss of your cherished breakfast cereals, Civil Eats had a great post on the production and manufacture of breakfast cereals, specifically the flake varieties:
…no matter how healthy and natural the advertising on the packages makes those crunchy bits of wheat, oats, and corn seem, they are actually a highly processed food whose nutrient value is questionable.
…
The slurry of cooked grains may be moved to a cooker-extruder where it is mixed with water, sugar, additives like food coloring, vitamins, minerals, preservatives, and salt, and cooked and agitated over high heat with a giant screw. It is then extruded out, and cut into any number of shapes, before being dried and packaged. For a narrated visual, check out this video showing how flakes are made.
Leaving aside the long list of added sugars and additives that appear in the ingredient list of your daily Froot Loop or Frosted Flakes, the actual process of making the cereal robs the grains of their inherent nutrients. With most of the outer layers of the grain removed during processing and with cooking temperatures as high as 250 to 300 degrees F, it’s hard to imagine that much nutrition remains in this food so many of us eat as “our most important meal of the day.”
And this article doesn’t even go into the nutrition – or lack thereof – in the flakes themselves, nor the number of insulting ingredients that may be present: lectins, glutens, artificial sweeteners, artificial chemical fortification, etc.
Now how were those eggs and bacon this morning?