Did you ever come across something in your food pantry that’s been sitting around for maybe 10 years, something you pretty much forgot about? This morning I came across some very old graham crackers. I was planning to make some chocolate pudding pie using soy milk, and I thought that a graham cracker crust would go nicely with this. I vaguely remembered having some crackers around, so I snooped around amidst the cans and bottles and boxes until I came across them. They were pretty much intact, no bugs or anything. But you could see — and smell — that they were way past their prime. So I walked over to the store and got a new box of graham crackers. And then I decided to put them side by side for comparison, thus the picture below.
The old ones are on the left, new ones on the right. As you can see, they seem to lose their color with age. They still had their texture, but they had an odor like rancid oil. That’s probably because the hydrogenated oils with which they were made finally spoiled. Those hydrogenated oils supposedly have a long shelf life, but not 10 years. If you were starving and there was nothing else to eat, you could probably get them down your throat. But the newer ones clearly seem nicer. Ah, the sweet blush of youth.
Well, just for once, I don’t accuse big business of swindling the masses here; not because of some old graham crackers that I forgot to eat. In fact, I’ll even give Nabisco and Keebler credit for responding to pressure from health advocates and eliminating hydrogenated oils and trans fat in their crackers. The saturated fat content is now pretty low too; eight little cracker squares have only 3% of the daily sat fat limit. So, is this the perfect snack?
Well, it ain’t bad so long as you stick to the plain ones (not the sugary version or the chocolate coated temptations). You could do much worse — and most of you do. But then there’s still the salt content to worry about — eight crackers give you 8% of the daily sodium limit; that other 92% gets filled out very quickly, say by a couple of slices of cheese and some bread, or an order of fries. You wouldn’t think that graham crackers should be salty, but they probably need NaCl for shelf life . . . so that today’s grahams won’t look like my 1996 vintage grahams after a just few months.
Bottom line, you’re on your own to munch responsibly here in America. If you truly want to be healthy, forget about the tasty treats that the big food corporations line the supermarket shelves with and mix up your own granola: toast a few handfuls of raw oatmeal on a pan in your oven and mix in some unsalted walnuts, unsalted sunflower seeds and black raisins. And if you really need to go wild, toss in a few almonds. I have that with lunch most every day. Enjoy!
