mayonnaise dilemma

I've been reading the Omnivore's Dilemma, both for personal interest and for school, and the book is blowing my mind. It's really well written and thoughtful, and is examining all aspects of the food industry.

As a result of the part of the book about corn and how it is broken down and reconstructed into everything from oils and sweeteners to adhesives and building materials, I've decided to try my best to stay away from processed foods. I never considered myself to be someone who consumed a lot of processed foods, and I guess I figured that as a vegetarian I was probably eating more or less good food most of the time. I definitely have an Yves addiction that needs to be dealt with, and the list of ingredients on my favourite vegetarian chick'n nuggets is making me cry. Corn, corn, corn.

Don't get me wrong, I love corn, corn is not the enemy. USDA polices forcing so called commodity crop (corn and soy mainly) farmers to grow more and more for less and less money, and at an increasing cost to our eco system (turning crude oil into fertilizers and pesticides isn't a good idea?) are the bad fellas. Corn grown sustainably for eating (rather than being processed) is awesome.

So I've been replacing my more processed than I had ever imagined sandwich slices with organic smoked tofu, making edamame salads with organic non GMO soy beans, eating nuts, beans, and organic free range eggs for protein. I'm trying to eat my food as whole as possible as often as possible. On Sunday, which in our house is dessert night, I made an angel food cake from scratch. This was previously the only cake I'd ever make from a mix, and now with a little help from Martha Stewart, I've learned that it is only marginally more time consuming to make one from scratch, and way more tasty. I'm not saying I'll never eat processed foods, hello, a veggie pepperoni pizza on a treat night, and I'm not going to throw away the ground round and nuggets in my deep freeze, but I'm doing my best.

So mayonnaise. I don't eat a lot of it, but sometimes I like a thin scraping in my sandwich or in my egg salad sandwich. It's also a dang tasty fry dip, and you know it. Yesterday I was telling this lady in one of my classes that I had to get home to attend to my yoghurt culture - I've been making my own yoghurt for over a year now. It has 2 ingredients; milk and some starter from the last batch of yoghurt. It's sooooo much better than commercial yoghurt with their yucky thickeners and shiz. Anyway, she says to me that she's never made yoghurt, but she makes her own mayo. I told her that I'd be open to making my own mayo except for my phobia of raw eggs, and she pointed out that there was raw eggs in the store bought stuff, plus a gazillion other processed ingredients. Somehow coming from a jar made me feel better about the rawness of the eggs, and I figured they must have been heat processed in some way to make them safe to eat. I don't know. Making it myself using local organic free range eggs is obviously going to be better for both my body and the planet than buying it in a jar. But there will be raw eggs. Yuck. I guess if I want to eat mayo occasionally I had better get my head around this thing.

Sigh.