Now with Totalitarian Protein!

It might seem trivial, but one of the few favorite cereals I get to eat on occasion is now gone.

I really need to avoid sugar.  Artificial sweeteners are getting more and more bad press, and even health-food cereals tend to have allegedly-healthier sugar-products ("evaporated cane juice," etc.) in them.

But there was Grape-Nuts.  Yeah, yeah, and there's still Shredded Wheat but that's like eating all-weather carpeting.

When I wanted a healthy carb blowout, Grape-Nuts with a little stevia, some sliced peaches, and whole milk -- not cruddy skim -- were healthy and still a treat.

I ran out.  I went to the store. And there was the new and Damnably Improved Grape-Nuts, now infused with .....

soy protein.

Now it has been decided for me that I MUST have protein in my cereal.

If I want protein with my cereal, I will have a goddam egg. Oh wait, that means choosing for myself.  Whatever was I thinking?

I wrote them a letter. It's pasted here.  I'd have improved the wording some if I'd taken more time, but it's adequate:

I am furious to discover that you have put soy protein into Grape-Nuts cereal.  Many of us are allergic or sensitive to soy.  You seem to think that i must have protein in my cereal. Soy gives me migraines and digestion problems. Soy is being forced on consumers in products to which it has NO relevance and does not belong,

I cannot understand this. Adding a protein-infused product would make business sense but REPLACING basic Grape-Nuts with this grain-plus-soy product does not.

It matters because there are not many unsweetened cereal choices.  Cereals without *any* sweeteners do exist, but there aren't many, and Grape-Nuts was my favorite. Nothing was better with some peaches and milk.  Now I have to give it up.

PLEASE restore original, SIMPLE Grape-Nuts to your product line.

I expect to get nowhere, and can always go to the health food store, or to another grocery that stocks a whole foods section. Cascadia Farms or Health Valley, or whatever brand does their own barley-nugget-cereal version, does exist and is still nice basic "It's carb because carb is what cereal is, OH-frikkin-Kay?"  

I hope and pray.  Because natural-food producers are apparently as much in the soy-lobby's iron grip as Big Food is. The soy lobby isn't funny.  They see to it that their beans are forced on us in every bizarre way, shape, and form.  They convinced Amy's Organic foods to add tofu, of all obnoxious things, to bean-and-cheese products, like those aren't basic vegetable protein, some with dairy protein, dishes already.

Ever looked at your salad dressing label?  Most of the organic/health food dressings are soybean-oil based, just like Kraft, Hidden Valley, et al. I found a couple that aren't, in 2 different stores.  Bless these companies, and bless any store that stocks at least some alternative to soy:

With canola oil!

Remember Mazola corn oil margarine? From back about 40 years ago? Have you tried lately to find any margarine that's not soybean oil?

I am fed up with soybean farmers and their stranglehold on US food production.

Fed.

Up.

All I can do is say my piece and then go buy something else. Maybe finding food should be a hard job again.  They make it easy for us First Worlders, and we just smile and put it in the shopping cart, and stop casting critical eyes on them.  I've been as complacent as anybody.