Israel\u2019s Health Ministry recently ruled that\u00a0Heinz<\/a>\u00a0tomato ketchup does not contain enough \u201ctomato solids\u201d to qualify as ketchup, and it will now have to be referred to as \u201ctomato seasoning,\u201d the\u00a0Times of Israel reports<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I\u2019m not going to get into the many hazards of HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup), but suffice it to say it\u2019s got an extra molecule that doesn\u2019t belong and that extra molecule causes the body to metabolize it 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 and learn how it\u2019s made.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know exactly when Heinz pulled the plug on Ketchup and started selling some red stuff they called ketchup, but they couldn\u2019t fool me. I used to drive several hundred miles and cross the border into Canada, just to get Heinz Ketchup made in Leamington, Ontario where they still made ketchup with real sugar and real tomatoes. You think I\u2019m making this up, but I\u2019m not. One time, and my youngest son can verify this for you, I got stopped at the U.S. border by U.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.<\/p>\n I 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 garbage Heinz was foisting upon the public \u2013 American Heinz Ketchup \u2014 made from canned tomatoes and HFCS.<\/p>\n So you\u2019re probably wondering what about other brands? Sure, I\u2019m not stupid; I read the labels of every brand of ketchup I could find \u2013 Hunt\u2019s, the number two ketchup in the USA, decided that to compete with Heinz they too would trim costs and make ketchup from canned tomatoes, picked who knows when, and sweeten it up with HFCS. So our American grocery store shelves were festooned with red bottles purporting to be ketchup, but only resembled slightly that poor man’s sauce that my grandfather squirted on his 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… we thought they’d never end.<\/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 is 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, it embedded in my memories, it reminds me of my grandfather … and and every one of those things is 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 sometimes of burning autumn leaves \u2014 these are the 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 in some form, 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 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\u00a0 amusing — or even 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 some WalMart stores. It’s also available at Wild Oats stores and Wholefood Markets and on Amazon.<\/p>\n I opened my first bottle of it a couple weeks ago, and by its smell and taste I was transported back in time to a beautiful old home, on a beautiful old street, on a beautiful mid-September morning, when I, a child, felt like the luckiest kid on Earth because I had family that loved me and I was surrounded by the smell of autumn,\u00a0 the aroma of burning leaves, and ketchup factories running at full tilt.\u00a0 The fragrance of freshly made ketchup and of the burning leaves serenaded by the clanking of the goings on in the salvage yard are are memories and treasures I\u2019ll never forget.<\/p>\n And lately more and more companies (not Heinz) have decided to do the right thing and leave HFCS out of the poor man’s sauce. Hellmann’s and French’s<\/a> both offer ketchup made without HCFS. Hellman’s uses tomato puree instead of concentrated tomatoes, and\u00a0 sweetens their brew with honey…. read all about it.<\/a><\/p>\n They say ketchup is the poor man\u2019s sauce, but it\u2019s a lot more than that to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ketchup: The Poor Man’s Sauce 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\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13582,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[228],"tags":[1720,2399],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14997"}],"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=14997"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14997\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15002,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14997\/revisions\/15002"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Cloudeight](\"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/wildoats.png\")
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