Today I spent a fair amount of time at BJ’s Warehouse in the attempt to buy food. This is a really good idea, at the rate at which I am getting rid of food around here.

Happily- I did manage to fill my cart, but not without some serious label reading. More than once I picked up a package which listed sugar as the umpteenth ingredient (gotcha!) only to go back to the drawing board and find another brand of the same sort of item which (hooray!) did not. Two seemingly identical bags of pistachios revealed their true nature when flipped over: one had sugar listed among a myriad of other ingredients, the other listed pistachios and sea salt.

See, now was that so hard? Is is so hard to just put food in our food? I mean, I’m just saying.

But forgive me: I’m tired and cranky from all that small type and realizing I had to throw my favorite breakfast cereal out this morning (Crispy Hexagons, how could you?) Okay, some sugar items are pretty blinking obvious- Nutella, hello?- but I continue to be blindsided by many others, ie: the number of items from the health-food store/section of the supermarket that I have now been forced to take an honest, unflinching look at… call it the Evaporated Cane Syrup Brigade, if you will. What? You mean I can’t have peanut butter Clif bars anymore?? Wait, nobody told me that!

Meanwhile, last night when dinner was over our five-year-old started describing the kind of little thingies-with-the-something-inside she would like for dessert and I gently reminded her about the “family project.” She was sad for a moment- but quickly rebounded, much to my surprise. Despite our preconceptions about the love affair between children and sugar, I’m beginning to wonder if the family project may actually end up being harder on Mom and Dad. After all, we’ve been around a lot longer, we’ve had a lot longer to get hooked.

••••

Information About The No Sugar Project