They say that ketchup is the poor man\u2019s sauce, whoever they<\/em> are. They say a lot of things. They say what\u2019s good for the goose is good for the gander too, but how many of you walk around calling male geese ganders? Not many, but THEY do. But I don\u2019t want to talk about geese, ganders or what THEY say; I want to talk about ketchup.<\/p>\n My grandfather taught me a lot of things, most of the things he taught me have stuck with me my whole life \u2014 like my love of ketchup. I can remember going on vacation with my grandparents and watching grandpa smother fried eggs and hash brown potatoes in ketchup in restaurants from Michigan to Mississippi, from the Alleghenies of Pennsylvania to the agonies of driving through The Great Smoky Mountains in dense fog. At every meal we stopped to eat a long the way, no matter what food was served, you could bet it included ketchup.<\/p>\n So I come by my love of ketchup honestly. I was born and raised on the poor man\u2019s sauce. But as I grew up, something changed, and it wasn\u2019t my love of ketchup, it was the ketchup I loved. It seems in industry\u2019s greed for higher profits, cheaper ingredients, the Holy Grail of ketchup, Heinz decided it could mess around with my beloved sauce and start making it from canned tomato sauce instead of fresh, red, ripe tomatoes. And to make matters worse, and in order to save money, the squirted it full of HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup) instead of sugar.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not going into great detail about the hazards of HFCS, but suffice it to say it\u2019s got an extra molecule that doesn\u2019t belong and one that causes the body to metabolize sugar like alcohol, that is, in the liver. Oh, you may doubt me, but you can look it up. HFCS is some nasty stuff \u2014 do some research, see how it\u2019s made.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know exactly when Heinz pulled the plug on real ketchup and started selling the red stuff they called ketchup, but they couldn\u2019t fool me. Before the current anti-HFCS craze, I used to drive several hundred miles and cross the border into Canada, just to get Heinz Ketchup made in Leamington, Ontario, Canada where they still made ketchup with real sugar and real tomatoes.<\/p>\n You probably think I\u2019m making this up, but I\u2019m not. One time, (and my youngest son can verify this), I was\u00a0stopped\u00a0returning the the USA by\u00a0U.S. customs who found several dozen bottles of Canadian Heinz Ketchup in my car. The female customs agent, undoubtedly anxious to find some reason to detain me \u2014 smuggling ketchup? \u2014 finally gave up and let me back into the good, old U.S.A. with my precious cargo of 40+ bottles of real Heinz Ketchup. But\u00a0I will never forget the look she gave me.<\/p>\n Obviously, driving hours and hours just to find real ketchup isn\u2019t something that\u2019s very practical, so I, like every other U.S. citizen gave into convenience and bought the so-called ketchup that Heinz was foisting upon the American public \u2013 American Heinz Ketchup \u2014 made from canned tomatoes and, worse, lots of HFCS.<\/p>\n American grocery store shelves were festooned with red bottles purporting to be ketchup, but only resembled slightly the real ketchup my grandfather squirted on his fried eggs.<\/p>\n I use the word \u201csquirted\u201d nostalgically, Back in those days, almost all restaurants and diners had those plastic ketchup things on the table \u2013 and mustard things too \u2013 those plastic bottle-like things with the pointed hollow tops \u2013 the hollow tip was great to squirting ketchup \u2014 and mustard \u2013 onto food in generous quantities. The ketchup in those plastic things was the real stuff. And they used to leave it sitting out on the table all the time, even overnight. No refrigeration required. Those were the days my friend.<\/p>\n Ketchup, you may think \u201cpathetically\u201d, is a big part of my life. I know you now think I need to get a life, but I don\u2019t care. Ketchup means more than the poor man\u2019s sauce to me. It\u2019s more than the red oozing stuff that we dump on hamburgers or dip french fries in. It\u2019s part of my childhood memories and those are more precious to me than gold.<\/p>\n I can remember waking up on late summer mornings at my grandparents\u2019 house, the warm morning breeze, wafting through screened windows \u2014 they didn\u2019t have central A\/C \u2013 and the smell of the local ketchup factory making real ketchup from that summer\u2019s harvest of tomatoes. They did not use canned tomatoes and tomato paste from Argentina, or Chile, or Brazil or heaven knows where, grown and canned who knows how long ago. The farmers brought their tomatoes to the ketchup factory and the ketchup factory turned them into ketchup by cooking them in big copper kettles and adding real sugar and spices. Yum! You could smell ketchup in the air for miles.<\/p>\n That smell was subtle and wonderful and sweet; it would later become sweeter when mixed with my memories of those gentle days of my youth. Waking up in my bed, in my own room at my grandparents house, smelling the aroma of freshly made ketchup and listening to the clanking of the big metal magnets at a nearby salvage yard, and the smell of burning autumn leaves \u2014 are all memories of a childhood lost \u2014 but never forgotten.<\/p>\n The more things change, the more they stay the same. Heinz now makes something called \u201cSimply Heinz\u201d and it\u2019s better than the stuff with HFCS in it, but it still uses canned tomatoes, grown who knows where and who knows how long ago. Of course you\u2019ll have to pay a little more for it. The also make Heinz organic \u2014 but still not from fresh tomatoes, nope. Canned organic tomatoes \u2013 paste, puree, etc. They might be organic, but where were they grown, how long have they been held hostage in the cans?<\/p>\n French’s – the mustard people – is now making\u00a0ketchup – and it’s pretty darned good acutally. It’s made with real sugar – no HFCS. \u00a0And now\u00a0Hunt’s make an “All Natural” ketchup without HFCS, as well.<\/p>\n I don’t have to drive to Canada to get decent ketchup anymore. But, hey, Canada, you have really great beer!<\/em><\/p>\n If you\u2019ve read this far, then you either really love ketchup, you\u2019re extremely bored, or you find an older guy reminiscing about his childhood \u2013 interesting.<\/p>\n If you really love ketchup, I\u2019m going to tell you where you can get real ketchup, made from real tomatoes (pureed) that tastes like the aroma from the ketchup factory of long ago \u2013 the one I used to wake up to on late summer mornings. The one I\u2019ll never forget.<\/p>\n It\u2019s called Wild Oats Organic Ketchup and it\u2019s available \u2013 and how I hate to say this \u2013 at WalMart, as well as Wild Oats stores and Wholefood Markets. I opened my first bottle of it a couple of years\u00a0ago, and I was transported back in time to a beautiful old home, on a beautiful old street, on a beautiful late-September morning, when I as a child felt like the luckiest kid on Earth because I had family that loved me.<\/p>\n And the smell of freshly made ketchup and the pungent odor of burning leaves serenaded by the clanking of the goings-on in the salvage yard down the street – are memories and treasures I\u2019ll never forget.<\/p>\n The world has changed and sometimes the more things change, the more they remain the same.<\/p>\n They<\/em> say ketchup is the poor man\u2019s sauce…<\/p>\n but it\u2019s a lot more than a sauce to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ketchup They say that ketchup is the poor man\u2019s sauce, whoever they are. They say a lot of things. They say what\u2019s good for the goose is good for the gander too, but how many of you walk around calling male geese ganders? Not many, but THEY do. But I don\u2019t want to talk about geese, ganders or\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[228],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11470"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11470"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11470\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11471,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11470\/revisions\/11471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}