Post 3: "Real" food vs. "fake" food

JAM! It is sweet, and you can spread it on almost any bland food item to make it taste delicious! Jam can be eaten with bread, crackers, cake, and many many more. In the old days, my mom, my sister, and I would gather in the kitchen to make tomato jam! Considerable amount of tomatoes were boiled first then peeled and blended well. After that the blended tomato mix and sugar and other essentials were added in a pot and stirred for about an hour or more. The end product was a delicious, mouth-watering, appetite-inducing, sweet tomato jam! It seems unbelievable that tomatoes can be made into a jam right? But believe me it has such a distinct flavor that you won't be able to stop eating. The taste of this tomato jam still lingers with me even though I haven't had it in about nine years.

As everybody in my family became busy with their own work, we stopped making this jam as it was pretty time consuming and expensive due to the quality and amount of tomatoes needed. As a result, we switched to substituting this jam with Smuckers strawberry and grape jam. At first the taste was a little refreshing as it was something new, but as I had more and more all I could taste was sweetness. There was no taste of real strawberries or grapes. It tasted so artificial! One should be able to tell what their food is made of when they are eating it! If you look at the back of many jam bottles, there are way more ingredients than just the fruit and sugar. The high fructose corn syrup and artificial color additive can be quite harmful.

It is quite evident that many of the processed jams bought in grocery stores have little or no nutrients as the real substance. This is caused by the extensive alteration that they go through by addition of unnecessary chemicals and such to increase sweetness and reduce cost for the producers. Though this is the case, I am quite sure that I will not return to making tomato jam or any other jam for that matter. You may ask "Why?" My answer would be that making such jams are way more expensive and time consuming than dropping by a grocery store to pick of a bottle of jam.