product/service testing

Welcome back to my autism-aware shopping trip through the grocery store.  Week by week, I\’m showing you what the store sells, prune down the selection to what\’s safe for me (because autistic people can have very sensitive systems) and point out various gotchas the store tries to make you buy stuff you didn\’t come for. 

As a reminder, I shop with the following conditions in mind:

• dairy-free
• low sugar
• avoid ultraprocessed junk
• avoid artificial food coloring
• conditional vegetarianism
• avoid high histamine foods
• awareness of gluten-free options and sugar-free options

Before we leave the fruit section, we stop by the organic section.  Like the weekly deals, these sections rotate their contents frequently.  You can never be sure what they\’ll have available, though because it was grown without pesticides and herbicides, you can expect it to be more expensive than the general offerings.  

The \”select your own\” vegetable section.  I won\’t list every single thing available here, but suffice it to say there\’s a lot.  I mostly only stop by this section for lettuce, sugar snap peas, or snow peas.  But if you need just one of something (or a small amount of something), this is where you can go.  The bagged versions will be coming up shortly.

Part of why I rarely use this section is that it\’s routinely sprayed with water.  This is ostensibly to keep the produce fresher, but it also makes it wet to touch and accelerates the rot process once you get it home.  I\’m really not a fan.  

Onward to the main vegetable section.  The tomatoes, peppers, and for some reason, asparagus.  There\’s a few options for tomatoes, though mainly of the medium and large varieties.  Cherry and grape tomatoes are available, they\’re just behind the human I was trying to cut out of the picture.  Bell peppers in four colors: yellow, red, orange, and green.  There\’s actually even a stripey orange and yellow variety that shows up from time to time.  Green peppers are almost always the cheapest.  

I took this to give you a better idea of the variety available here.  Again, there is literally snow on the ground and temperatures are at or below freezing, so these have been shipped from a significant distance away.   It\’s honestly a very small sample of all the types of peppers that exist, but the fact that it\’s just flatly available 100% out of local growing season speaks to how absurdly well people in the US live.  Kings and emperors in centuries past didn\’t have this kind of selection.  

This is a weighing and labeling machine.  Produce doesn\’t always come in convenient plastic packages.  Sometimes you choose and bag your own using the bags there on the left.  This machine will weigh your produce.  It will also print you a custom bar code so that the bag can be scanned quickly at checkout.  I\’m old enough to remember when non-electronic scales were a common thing in grocery stores, but those days seem very long ago when I look at this machine…

Avocados.  Yep.  This is an endcap that\’s just entirely avocados.  Apparently my generation popularized consumption of them, in part due to their healthiness.  In my memory of decades past, this would have been a small segment of the broader vegetable section, not an entire endcap (plus the weekly sale island at the start).  

Plastic-wrapped broccoli, bulk bags of lettuce heads, bagged baby carrots, and bagged celery.  With salad fixings perched on top of the displays, because God forbid you simply eat salad without extra carbs.  

Organic options of the previous aisle, in an endcap.  Organic does not always mean \”better for the environment\” unfortunately, but as mentioned in the organic fruit section, it can be your best bet health-wise.  

The other side of the previous long island.  Plastic wrapped cabbage heads, large carrots, broccoli crowns (smaller than the other broccoli option, and with less stem), and cauliflower.  Absolutely everything you see here is sealed in plastic.  It helps preserve the freshness, but the plastic just ends up in a landfill.  

The other endcap on this island-aisle.  I\’m honestly not sure why, precisely, this is here, but it is.  These are non-meat, non-dairy options.  Seitan, tofu, pseudocheese, and veganaise.  Please note that even here, there is no escape from the barrage of snacks.  See the dumplings?  

This is a standalone island on the back edge of the area.  It\’s basically salad fixings.  This side has even more tomatoes, in the smaller varieties.  

And the other side, even more peppers and cucumbers great and small for all your salad needs. I\’ve found the tiny cucumbers nice for personal salads.  

This longer island is the last one in the line.  It\’s mainly onions and potatoes, though there\’s yams and some squash for good measure as well.  The endcap has bags of teensy tiny potatoes in up to three colors for a really staggering markup.  Then there are three colors of onions (red, white, and yellow), in both bulk bags and \”select your own.\” 

The other side of the onions/potatoes island-aisle.  Organic varieties of both on the end cap, and bulk bags of russet, yellow, and redskin potatoes.   Potatoes are a very solid food choice when they\’re not heavily processed or soaked in as much grease as they\’ll hold.  The problem, of course, is that most potato products fall into at least one of those categories…  

Moving on to the last part of the produce section, which is oddly not fresh at all…

I couldn\’t get a decent shot of this due to the stocking cart on the right hand side there, but this is basically just a bunch of plastic bags of dried fruit.  The variety here includes cherries, apricots, mango, and prunes.  Dried fruit is great in theory, but in practicality it\’s typically just more like candy with fiber.  It\’s usually laced with sugar to make the fruit extra appealing.  Read your nutrition facts and ingredients carefully. 

This is the other side of that display, and it includes seeds and vegetable snacks as well as raisins and dates.  I don\’t really know what one does to a pea pod to make it into a crispy salted snack, but I\’m a little afraid to find out.  

Moving on, we arrive at the bagged dried nuts.  This, like everything else in the store, is a demonstration in absurd variety.  We don\’t simply have peanuts.  We have blanched peanuts, red skin peanuts, Spanish peanuts, kettle cooked peanuts, raw Spanish peanuts (roast it yourself, I guess?), and mixed nuts with peanuts.  There\’s also pecans, and a bit further in, there\’ll be even more types of tree nuts.  As a reminder, this is the second section of snack nuts, the first being around the candy aisle.  

One end of the previous display.  These aren\’t cooking ingredients, they\’re snacks.  They\’re specifically packaged to go in a bowl or be eaten right out of the bag.  Mixed nuts and trail mix (with dried fruit) varieties.  

The other broad side of the display, where we can mainly find almonds and cashews.  You can have them roasted or raw, pre-sliced, salted or not, and blanched.  

Last but not least, the other end of the display, which is entirely pistachios.  All from a single company, but you can get sweet chili, salt and pepper, honey-roasted, and basic pre-shelled varieties.  

And that finishes the produce section!  It\’s been a surprisingly long trip through the grocery store.  I started this series in early September and never expected it to take a half year to finish, even with doing posts every two weeks.  It\’s been very educational for me, and I hope, for you as well.  It turned up some interesting (and horrifying) information about grocery store practices.  

In the course of this project, I went from shopping almost entirely at this grocery store (Meijer) to starting at Target (where the employees seem happier and more like people, anyway) and then only buying what I couldn\’t find there.  The sheer amount of manipulative marketing in terms of alcoholism and snacks in every corner of Meijer is more than I can morally tolerate.  I hope to transition to not shopping at this store at all in the coming year.

I\’ll do a bonus post in a couple weeks to show you the checkout aisles, because they\’ve changed somewhat in the last few years and I think it\’s worth knowing why.  Beyond that, thank you for joining me on this adventure!

Welcome back to my autism-aware shopping trip through the grocery store.  Week by week, I\’m showing you what the store sells, prune down the selection to what\’s safe for me (because autistic people can have very sensitive systems) and point out various gotchas the store tries to make you buy stuff you didn\’t come for. 

As a reminder, I shop with the following conditions in mind:

• dairy-free
• low sugar
• avoid ultraprocessed junk
• avoid food coloring
• conditional vegetarianism
• avoid high histamine foods
• awareness of gluten-free options and sugar-free options

Last time we finished off the numbered aisles.  We also saw a truly staggering number of TV dinners, and learned why, nutritionally and cost-wise, they\’re a trap.  This week we\’ll look into the meat and deli sections.

It\’s worth noting that there will be almost nothing for me in this section, because of the conditional vegetarianism mentioned above.  The US meat industry is, on the whole, supremely uninterested in matters of ethics and morality.  Meat animals are treated like objects, not living creatures, and given as little freedom as possible while still producing an edible product.  Maybe not a very healthy product, for you or for the environment, but that\’s irrelevant in the face of greed.

I\’ll pause here for a moment to note something very important:  there are a lot of things in life to care about.  One of my personal causes is the meat industry,  because I think that animals deserve to have lives beyond simply being my food.  If that is not high priority for you, or you don\’t have the money to afford more humane options, that is okay.  If your passion is ending human slavery, or starvation, or homelessness, or racial inequality, or just surviving this year because you\’re struggling hard and there seems to be no respite from the insanity, and you don\’t have time or energy to spend looking at the food on your plate right now… that is understandable.  This is something I care about, so I\’ll talk about it.  

However.  In no way am I saying, \”animal welfare is more important than any of those other things.\” It is important to me, and I\’ll be giving you information in regards to it.  I hope you\’ll look at it and keep it in mind, but if you don\’t, I am not somehow \”better than you\” or whatever it is self-righteous jerks are saying these days.  

Skipping past the very disturbing pictures of what the meat industry considers appropriate treatment for living creatures, I\’ll simply link you to Certified Humane\’s factsheets page.  Some of the common practices are described therein.  You can also check the FAQs page for a lot of very specific questions about their standards.  

I consume Certified Humane and Animal Welfare Approved products due to their transparency and independent verification processes.  This grocery store typically carries very little of either of those, but I\’ll point out the exception. 

I figured we could start with the fresh meat counter.  I had to wait a good bit to get a shot without anyone in it, but I think it was worth it.  The counter is almost always staffed by at least one person, waiting to weigh and custom-chop whatever you care to buy from their selection.  

A reasonable selection.  And all of it seems nice and fresh.  Did you know red dye goes into most beef products to make it seem fresher than it is?  They also tinker with the air balance in the cases and packages to keep that red color as long as possible.  The meat isn\’t super fresh, it\’s just been made to look like it is.

Same with that salmon, by the way.  That dark color is unlikely to be natural.  Farmed fish doesn\’t have the type of diet to produce that color, so the farms feed them the processed color.  Otherwise the resulting filets would be grey. 

Before we dive into the rest of the meat section, let\’s have a look at the lunch meats.  As you can see, they are legion, and roughly organized by brand. Ham, turkey, chicken, salami, roast beef, bologna, it\’s all here.  You can also snag hot dogs on the far end there. And, though it\’s hard to see, meat-and-cheese snacks just after the hot dogs.  

 

Past the the lunchmeat and the meat counter proper is a set of floating refrigerator islands that serve as aisles.  They\’re roughly organized by meat type.  For example, here\’s the beef cuts and lamb sections.  (Lamb is all the way at the end, basically a nubbin of a section due to the lower demand.)  Also, lest you be worried… that\’s not all the beef available.  It\’s just certain cuts.  There\’s still ground beef and such elsewhere, even aside from the butcher\’s counter above.  We\’ll get there, but first, we have to cross an ocean of pig products.  

There\’s also a whole section for sausage  It\’s mostly the ground variety, but don\’t worry, bratwurst and smoked sausage have their own sections.  Also, in case you were wondering if there were going to be snacks in this section… fear not!  Here they are, on the near end of the main aisle.  They\’re prepackaged meat and cheese snacks, in case you didn\’t get enough of those in the cheese section.  

And here\’s the rest of the sausage.  And also more snacks.  As you can see, the impulse buy endcaps may or may not be entirely related to the aisle they\’re connected to, because that\’s Lunchables, hot dogs, and lunch meat.  None of which has much to do with sausage.  

You know, prior to 2020 I think I would have said more of these aisles were devoted to beef products, rather than pork products.  I\’m honestly unsure if there\’s a supply issue with beef, or if this is just how it\’s been for the last dozen years and I just didn\’t notice.  At any rate, ham and ground turkey share an aisle here.  I\’m told ground turkey is a lot leaner than ground beef, but since I typically buy my beef locally, I haven\’t had much occasion to try it.  It is definitely more environmentally friendly than beef.  

Did you wonder where the bacon was?  Worry no more, there\’s a whole aisle for it.  Sunday, Canadian, and streaky, it\’s all here.  Various brands and price points, and varying levels of fattiness.  

Despite most of the meat section being for pork products, there is still some room for chicken… so here it is.  We\’re mostly looking at chicken breasts here, but there are also thighs and ground chicken.  

Please note the sign here: \”Due to high demand Limit 2 on all fresh chicken products.\”  I\’ve never actually found out if this is enforced, or if it\’s merely a suggestion.  I\’ve also basically never seen a sign like this prior to 2020.  (Now that 2020 is over, I\’ve seen dozens like it and barely notice except when it affects my immediate shopping trip.)

Mostly hidden in the near side of the aisle is the \”we\’re fancy and humane\” section.  Katie\’s Best is a GAP Step 2 option.  I prefer mine Step 4 and above, which is why I opt for the other available brand there: Smart Chicken.  

You have your option of boneless breast meat or boneless thigh meat.  It\’s a sign of how astonishingly sheltered I am that I honestly prefer just eating breast meat and will skip chicken entirely if it\’s not that.  It\’s a texture and flavor thing.  Also a \”good Lord that\’s some serious privilege\” thing.  

It\’s hard to see on the package, but on the right hand side label, at the bottom left, there\’s the Certified Humane label.  Weirdly, only the organic Smart Chicken has that label.  The regular (blue packaging) version doesn\’t.  

Two of the specials for this week.  This isn\’t the cheapest I\’ve ever seen ground beef (I\’ve seen it for 99 cents a pound a few times), but it\’s pretty inexpensive.  It\’s a pity the cows involved suffered horribly and likely never tasted grass in their lives, because that\’s the only way you can afford to offer meat that cheaply.  

This just makes me wonder how many kinds of pepperoni a person really needs.  For those counting, that\’s four brands, in standard, low fat, tiny, and \”cup shaped\” varieties.  Why?  I really don\’t know.  

And last in the meat section, the only section I regularly visit.  Ground beef is fine and all, but this section also sometimes contains ground bison.  It also, as you can see, contains the growing share of plant-based protein products.  When Impossible ground \”meat\” showed up next to my ground bison, I was dubious (and bought some anyway, because why not?).  There seems to be a significant demand, though, because now it\’s not just Impossible products, it\’s Lightlife and Pure and Beyond Meat.  I have yet to try most of these, because I\’m pretty happy with ground bison and my locally raised beef.  But I really should, because some of these might be delicious. Variety is the spice of life, after all.

On to the deli section.  The store actually goes Meat Section, Bakery Section, Deli Section, in an L shape, but that would have made no thematic sense and also been a very lengthy post, so I decided to cluster meat and deli in one and get to the bakery later.

Once again, you can go up to the counter and have exact ounces and pounds of meat and cheese portioned out for you for the price of that meat/cheese and a smidgen of human contact.  

Because meat is still meat, and dairy is not my friend, I also don\’t use this counter.  This is a bonus, because I prefer to avoid talking to strangers as a rule.  Too many factors in communicating for (usually) very little reward.  

The rest of the deli section is a series of floating island-aisles, about half the length of the meat section ones.  They\’re stubby rectangles with shelves on all four sides. This particular one is the closest to the deli counter, as you can perhaps tell by looking at the packaged-meat contents.  Do note the snack packages of beef jerky and meat/cheese snacks right next to it.  Those are awfully small, though, don\’t you think?

Additional cheese blocks/chunks.  These are the \”fancy\” compared to the regular cheese section.  This is also your spot to pick up feta cheese.  

Fish filets, prepackaged crabcakes, etc.  I mostly don\’t do seafood but it\’s here if you want it.  

I don\’t even know what to say to this one.  I guess I\’m in the minority for not liking potato salad?  There\’s a few varieties, of course, but really.  It\’s all potato salad.  

If you thought this place didn\’t have enough convenience food, you were right.  Meet the take and bake pizzas, as well as more party trays and ready-made cheese fondu… ish… stuff.  Have I mentioned this is all right near the vegetable and fruit section and wandering too far in any direction will land you into all this?

Yep.  Before we kiss this section goodbye… if you can be tempted by convenience food but insist it be hot… well, for a nice markup, you may buy a pizza right here and save yourself the trouble of having to wait until you get home, or use the oven.  

So yeah.  That\’s the meat and deli sections of this grocery store.  We\’re almost done with my trip through the grocery store.

By the way, you can eat meat and seafood more sustainably without having to resort to store-hopping the way I do.  There\’s delivery services (pandemic-friendly!) that will ship you a box of clean, sustainably produced meat once a month (or more, if you want).  

Butcher Box is the everything option.  They\’ll do chicken, beef, pork, and seafood.  You can let them send you a mix of what\’s available, or customize your own box. This is a really simple way of ensuring you eat better, fresher, and kinder.  All it takes is some freezer space.  As a bonus, they actually mention Temple Grandin\’s more humane butchering and slaughtering practices as part of their process.  

For folks specifically interested in seafood, please consider VitalChoice, which has a monthly box option but also lets you do regular online orders from their thoroughly-traced and -certified offerings.  Mercury and other heavy metals are a serious problem in seafood, and they\’re particularly detrimental to autistic people, whose bodies may be unable to purge those toxic substances from our systems effectively.  VitalChoice is one of the very few autism-safe seafood options.  

Welcome back to my autism-aware shopping trip through the grocery store.  Week by week, I\’m showing you what the store sells, prune down the selection to what\’s safe for me (because autistic people can have very sensitive systems) and point out various gotchas the store tries to make you buy stuff you didn\’t come for. 

As a reminder, I shop with the following conditions in mind:

• dairy-free
• low sugar
• avoid ultraprocessed junk
• avoid food coloring
• conditional vegetarianism
• avoid high histamine foods
• awareness of gluten-free options and sugar-free options

Last time we explored the frozen \”food\” section, where ultra-processed flour, ultra-processed meat (that likely isn\’t what it says it is), and of course, dairy.  We found that, despite most of the aisle being unredeemable junk food, there was the occasional meal that wasn\’t hideous for you.  However, you really had to watch it, because trans fats, massive loads of preservatives, and sneaky sugar bombs are hiding among the options.  Even the healthy-looking ones.  

This week, though… 

It\’s the very last aisle!  I had no idea this series was going to take me months to finish when I started it.  We still have to hit the meat and deli departments, and then the vegetables and fruit, but we\’re almost done.  

Anyway, remember all that frozen convenience food we looked at last time?  Here\’s more.  It\’s all pizza.  

Seriously, basically this entire side of the aisle is pizza.  \”How many kinds of pizza could there possibly be?\” you might be asking.  

Actually, the answer is \”a lot fewer than you\’d hope.\”  Mostly what we have here is a metric ton of different brands, not pizza varieties.  There\’s variations in crust type… thin crust, regular crust, thick crust, and even stuffed crust.  But the toppings are pretty much cheese, often with various kinds of meat (typically pepperoni or sausage, maybe ham once in a while).  Maybe you\’ll get the occasional veggie pizza, or meat plus veggie.  

Why am I complaining about variety, you might wonder, when there\’s all this?  Well, here\’s the thing.  US frozen pizza (and much of the typical pizza joint offerings, too) is pretty much crust, tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese (maybe a couple others if you\’re lucky), and one or more of like… seven basic toppings.  Excessively light on the vegetables in almost all cases.  

If you look around the rest of the world, you\’ll find significantly more variety.  Curry powder or other sauces, dozens of cheese types, seafood, even sweet pizzas or fruit pizzas.  So given all those options, maybe it\’s a bit more understandable if I\’m not excited about 14 different versions of pepperoni pizza. 

The branding varies markedly.  It mostly doesn\’t matter to me, sadly, because cheese is dairy and the crust is ultra-processed grains.  The meat, of course, is unlikely to be sourced humanely.  

An example of multiple crust types. Rising crust is likely to be a medium to deep dish crust, whereas thin crust will be what it says on the tin.  

Did you wonder where the snacks were?  Don\’t worry, I found \’em.  Please note the wide variety that still isn\’t very diverse.  Also some of these are strombolis.  Those are basically rolled up pizzas, toppings inside.  Or at least these are.  

Before we say goodbye to the pizza section and move on entirely to the appetizers, let\’s have a look at the best attempts to make pizza healthy.  There\’s organic versions, dairy-free ones, ones with veggie-based crusts, and gluten-free ones.  

The second section, similar to the first.  It gets a bit more adventurous by including chicken and cauliflower crusts.  I\’ve had cauliflower crust when my uncle came to visit once.  It\’s pretty decent, but I wouldn\’t be able to mistake it for typical pizza crust.  

Which is an issue with most substitutes, really.  We always want something that tastes exactly like what we love, but without being unhealthy/allergenic/whatever else.  I had the same struggle with veggieburgers for the longest time.  Eventually I just got to the point where I appreciated certain veggieburgers (before the era of Beyond Meat/Impossible Burger) for what they tasted like, not how well they replicated what they were replacing.  

Starting the move away from pizzas, we now have pizza in appetizer format.  They\’re cheap, they\’re ultraprocessed, and you can eat a heaping handful of them and still be hungry.  But don\’t worry, it\’ll still cost you hundreds of empty calories!

If you liked pizza in appetizer format, you may also have lasagna in appetizer format, pizza appetizer on tiny bagels, soft pretzels in various forms, and breaded cheese.  I think the healthiest thing in this case is the spinach and artichoke dip, and that\’s still laden with cheese, so…  Probably not even close.

Moving on from convenience appetizers, we apparently didn\’t get enough convenience food last aisle.  So here\’s more.  Grab and go burritos seem to be a big thing, given this section.  They\’re not that hard to make at home, though, though, so this just makes me wonder how these are profitable.  

Also, note the dairy-free Daiya options at the top right, as well as a gluten-free option.  There\’s not much, but there\’s something.  

Speaking of Daiya, we\’re moving onto the other side of the aisle, which has ice cream, and they have stuff here as well.  I\’m honestly not sure why the ice cream aisle starts out with the allergy- and diet-friendly snack-sized options first, but it does.  

I am sorry to say I basically haven\’t tried any of these.  I do enjoy So Delicious\’s typical ice cream (or frozen dessert, whatever) varieties, so it\’s likely their ice cream bar style options here are good.  

As with any seemingly healthy sweet treats, keep an eye out for what they\’re sweetened with.  The good ones are sugar alcohols, like erithrytol, stevia, and monk fruit.  You typically won\’t find those, but it\’s worth checking.  

And on to the more typical frozen treats.  Please don\’t make the mistake of thinking those \”fruit bars\” are healthy.  Their sugar content tends to be nearly your full day\’s serving in one measly bar.  

Another thing to watch out for with brightly-colored treats is what they\’re colored with.  Food dye is often very bad news for autistic people and others with sensitive systems.  (It\’s bad news for everyone else too, but we\’re the ones that show the strongest reactions.)

These are mostly unrepentantly awful for you, so I don\’t have a ton to say about them other than \”seriously, watch your sugar intake.\”  And I guess \”gee, I wish all this dairy didn\’t screw me over.\”  

If a box of frozen treats was too much for you, meet the single serve options, as well as the beginning of the \”pint size\” section.  You\’ll also note the dairy-free So Delicious, Ben & Jerry\’s, and, to my astonishment, the local brand Hudsonville.  

Some investigation was clearly called for!  

This is the nutritional information and ingredients for a pint of caramel cookie dough from Hudsonville.  It\’s coconut based.  As you can see, it is pretty much still ice cream.  This is not a healthy option, it\’s simply a dairy-free option.  It\’s sweetened with brown sugar and and cane sugar, which is a pretty basic option.  At least it\’s not artificial sweeteners.  

And here we have Ben & Jerrys\’ take on dairy-free Chocolate Fudge Brownie, with their trademark mix-ins.  This is an almond-based product, and like the one above, it is definitely not a healthy snack.  I appreciate Ben & Jerry\’s in particular because A) their typical stuff tastes very good and B) they\’re pretty darned serious about using Fair Trade, which safeguards the farmers they buy from.  

Finally, there\’s this, which I actually stared at for quite a while before buying.  Keto ice cream seems, uh…  I dunno, incredibly contradictory?  Anyway, here\’s the nutritional info and the ingredients.  This flavor is not nondairy, though they did have a butter pecan variant that was.  More notably, check the sugar.  Zero grams.  How?  Well, it\’s sweetened with erythritol (a sugar alcohol) and monk fruit extract (a plant-based, non-sugar sweetener).   

Calories-wise, this still isn\’t… really… healthy…  but it won\’t rot your teeth or wreck your blood sugar.  

The beginning of the \”half gallon\” section.  That\’s in quotes because they stopped being half-gallons a few years back.  One of those \”we need to save money so let\’s just hope they don\’t notice\” measures.  This section is more or less organized by brand.  Purple Cow is this store\’s own brand.  

There\’s an acceptable amount of variety on display in these sections.  You\’re still likely to be able to walk down the whole aisle and not find what you\’re looking for, if it\’s something obscure.  But your chances are better than the pizza aisle, at least.  

I don\’t think I\’ve actually tried this local brand, but one hopes the price includes a significant amount of quality.  

If you walked all the way down this aisle for sherbet (naturally dairy-free), here it is.  Right along with the gallon tubs of cheap ice cream.  I\’ve never stopped to think about how many calories must be packed into those tubs, and now that I have, I am both horrified and also hope it never occurs to me to think about it again.  

The aisle ends with even more snack-sized things, because we can never, ever forget where we\’re shopping.  Frozen pies, frozen cheesecakes and ice cream cakes (including dairy-free ones) round off this trip.  

I might be slandering one or two items in this aisle, but I honestly don\’t believe there was a single nutritionally solid item this time.  No nourishing food exists here.  This is an aisle to skip whenever possible.

And that\’s the last aisle.  Really.  There\’s more store to go, but we\’ve finally hit the end of the numbered aisles.  We\’ve still got the meat, deli, bakery, fruit, and vegetable sections to go, but those aren\’t numbered.  They\’re much more freeform.  

As an immediate example, here\’s the best shot I can get of the Bakery.  It\’s mashed between the meat department and the deli department, in a mostly open space peppered with islands.  On the left is the only aisle.  

We\’ll start with that singular aisle, since it\’s the closest to what we\’ve looked at in the past.  It\’s the bread aisle, where you can find a variety of bread loaves.  Notice anything off?  

If you said any variation of \”hey, what are those snack packs of roasted nuts doing at roughly eye-level in the bread aisle?\” please pat yourself on the back, because you win.  Apparently unsatisfied with tempting you in literally every other aisle, and also apparently unable to snackify loaves of bread, the store has opted to simply shove a row of unrelated snacks directly in your path.  

Yes, that row of snacks goes all the way down to the end of the aisle.  It\’s doubly frustrating once you see the rest of this section.  

Anyway, aggravation aside, there\’s about eleventy billion types of bread.  They\’re more or less by brand.  Like the pizza aisle, there\’s a lot of options without there actually being a lot of variety.  Also like the pizza aisle, very little of what\’s in this aisle is good for you.  In large part, most of what\’s here is ultra-processed.  

Honestly, that variety right near the front of the picture is maybe a good example.  \”15 Grain\” whole grain bread.  You don\’t need 15 grains to be healthy, they\’re literally just throwing in trace amounts of whatever might stick in hopes of grabbing attention and pretending to be healthy.  

The other side of this aisle mostly doesn\’t even pretend to be healthy.  It\’s hot dog buns, burger buns, and at the end, bagels and English muffins.  I\’m not sure why the latter two were so sold out at the time of the picture.  

At the end of the bread aisle, we start getting on towards the bakery counter.  But first we have to pass this refrigerated section with the ice cream cakes, cheesecakes, tubbed cookie dough, and other snack options.  Because, as we can never ever forget, this store is roughly half snacks.  

Speaking of snacks, this is the other side of the hot dog/hamburger buns aisle.  And it is all snacks.  I\’ve seen these referred to as \”sweet breads\” which struck me as absurd, and I much prefer the \”snack cakes and donuts\” sign they\’ve got up here.  Yes, this is literally a whole aisle of sugar-coated heart-killing madness.  A lot of these frosted sugary garbage items have trans-fats in them, by the way.  At least nothing in this aisle is even remotely pretending to be healthy.

We now come to one of the first floating islands of treats.  There are many in the bakery section, and they\’re sometimes themed, like this one.  Weirdly, only about half the things on this island are pies.  A few of them are pie-adjacent, like the lemon bars.  I don\’t know what the rest is about.  All of this is bad for you in sugar content and ultra-processed grain content.  

Lest you be worried, no, this is not all the cookies they have for sale.  Please do note the single serve larger cookies available for a dollar.  This store will absolutely bend over backwards to make sure you have access to every snack you could ever want.  As long as it\’s a snack.  

See?  This whole section is geared specifically around the idea of \”treat yourself, a little won\’t hurt.\”  But it absolutely will!  Especially since it\’s statistically unlikely someone will eat just one of those boxed treats.  Because if you\’ve had one, and it\’s good, why not treat yourself to a second?  And a third, and a fourth, and a fifth if you aren\’t paying attention.  Soon the whole box is gone and you feel awful about yourself, not to mention your gut being angry because you\’ve eaten a boatload of sugar.  But shhh, treat yourself!  Consequences are irrelevant!

This picture didn\’t turn out great, but this one of the offerings from the picture above.  It\’s a celebratory box of blondie brownie with sprinkles and frosting.  One of these suckers will cost you 180 calories and your full day\’s worth of sugar.  Remember how people tend to just keep eating?  Yeah, these will absolutely make you ill.  Also, look at the length of that ingredient list!  At the very end there\’s like six artificial colors (probably because of the sprinkles).  This is a very yikes thing to put into your body.  

So about \”yikes,\” here\’s \”breakfast.\”  We\’re mainly looking at muffins here.  Unfortunately, because this is the United States, these muffins have far more in common with cupcakes in terms of sugar and fat content.  Also icing.  And studded with chocolate chips, if not entirely chocolate chip.  These are not breakfast, they\’re dessert.  Start your day out right wrong, with a heaping helping of sugar!

We already did mini-indulgences in a separate section…  So here\’s more, with the exact same sign, because this store desperately wants to drown you in sugar and snacks.  These are mini cakes.  They have even more at the counter proper, but we\’re not quite there yet.  

No sub-heading for these.  It\’s just more of everything, a smorgasbord of cakes, cookies, and everything terrible for you.  Is it any wonder more than 10% of the US population has diabetes?  

You knew we\’d get here eventually.  This is the bakery counter.  You know, when I think \”bakery\” I think bread, actually.  Not \”cakes as far as the eye can see.\”  There\’s various creative options here, and you can get a cake iced with your loved one\’s name or a special message if you want it.  There\’s also various sizes of \”personal celebration\” cakes.  From round ones like you saw above, to \”extra large rectangular slice\” cakes.  Also cupcakes and grab-and-go slices of cheesecake.  Because of course.  

On your right from the bakery counter is more caloric and heart-destroying confections.  I\’m not really sure why the COVID-19 pandemic hasn\’t closed this self-serve nonsense, but it hasn\’t.  At least not here.  Anyway, you hand-select your doughnuts, box them yourself, and pay for them at the checkout.  

Don\’t feel like picking your own?  That\’s fine, here\’s a bunch of plastic-boxed doughnuts for your perusal.  Also more affronts to the concept of a good start to your day, in the form of cinnamon buns, doughnut holes, Danishes, etc.  

That\’s the majority of the bakery section, but I thought we\’d round it out with some actual bread.  I didn\’t take exhaustive pictures of this section, but there\’s various options.  Baguettes, ciabattas, sourdough.  The back side has dinner rolls of various kinds.  

A display for offerings from specific bakery sources. These will mainly be specialty items, but sometimes you get a mixed bag of things.  

By the way, you may have noticed I\’ve been rather disparaging of this whole section.  And you might then wonder, \”well if all of this bread is bad, are we just supposed to not eat bread?\”  And the answer is \”No, but please meet Ezekiel bread and consider trying it.\”  

This is a sprouted grain bread.  That is to say, the grains used to make it were literally grown for the briefest amount of time.  This uses up much of the sugar content inherent in the seeds, provides increased nutrition, and also makes them easier to digest.  There\’s various types, including gluten-free options.  Also English muffins, tortillas, pocket breads, and buns.  

I mostly get the basic loaves and make sandwiches and snacks of them.  A slice of this bread with a thin coating of nut or seed butter goes a stunningly long way to silencing late night food cravings.  Seriously, it\’s my immediate go-to snack.  

And that concludes the final aisle and the bakery section!  We\’ve learned that the very first aisle has nothing of nutritional value in it, and the bakery is only slightly better.  

We\’ve still got the meat and deli sections, and then the fresh fruits and vegetables.  And perhaps the checkout lanes.  I haven\’t quite decided, but they are definitely manipulative.  

Welcome back to my autism-aware shopping trip through the grocery store.  Week by week, I\’m showing you what the store sells, prune down the selection to what\’s safe for me (because autistic people can have very sensitive systems) and point out various gotchas the store tries to make you buy stuff you didn\’t come for. 

By and large, this aisle is cereal on one side, and refrigerated et cetera on the other.  We\’ll start with the cereal.  

Hey, remember how I\’ve been complaining in weeks past about snack foods?  At the start of this aisle, we have both the bulk bags and the snack sized cereals!  One hideous-for-the-environment plastic bowl plus a serving of cereal.  Just add your milk of choice and a spoon, and you\’re good.  I\’ve bought a couple of these recently when I was craving a particular cereal and didn\’t anticipate wanting more of it but it\’s really not an ethical choice.

After the snack-sized things we get into the full array.  The picture basically goes almost to the end of the aisle, and it\’s roughly grouped by manufacturer.  I\’m not sure why Post cereals are here at the head of the line, but presumably it has something to do with their popularity or the amount of money paid to be displayed first.  

Before we dive into a deeper look at everything here, it\’s important to note that all these brightly colored cereals (like the marshmallow bits, fruit colors, and anything that turns milk a color when you\’re eating it), is made with artificial colors.  

I had one mother of an autistic boy comment that she\’d swear \”the color red, in food\” was the cause of some of her kid\’s aggression behaviors.  Which is entirely possible, because food coloring can be made in a lot of different ways, and isn\’t rigorously tested on humans.  

If you\’ve been wondering why I haven\’t gone on a rant about sugar in cereal, well…  Congrats, you\’ve been paying attention.  

My pictures aren\’t the best here so I\’ll summarize the important stuff.  We\’re starting with some obviously terrible cereals.  Really, no one should reasonably look at either of these cereals and assume they\’re healthy.  For one cup of cereal, these will cost you 12 grams of sugar.  That\’s most of your daily sugar budget, right there.  And it\’s added sugar, by the way, so literally sugar mixed into it and also sprayed onto it after it was processed.  Sugar bomb!

That\’s for one cup of cereal.  Does that sound reasonable to you?  Let\’s see, shall we?  

This is my cereal bowl.  It\’s a medium bowl, used for soup or salads or cereal as needed.  It\’s neither particularly large nor small.  

Now we\’ll measure out a cup of our dessert cereal of choice, who I won\’t give free advertising to by naming.  This seems fine so far, right?  Let\’s put the cereal in the bowl.

Seems all right.  Maybe a bit small of a serving.  Is this about how much you\’d usually put in the bowl?  It isn\’t for me, so let\’s fill up the bowl properly.  

Here we are.  This is about how much cereal I\’d typically put in this bowl.  Doesn\’t look like that much more, visually, really.  

But when we pull it back out and measure it… it\’s over two cups.  More than twice the recommended serving.  And it barely looks different to me.  This is a very rough demonstration of how this works, and I\’m sure most people would only err by half a cup, given a similar bowl.  But you see what I mean now, when I say that serving sizes are tricky.  

To avoid making this mistake, you\’d have to measure out your cereal every time.  How many people do that, do you think?  

But maybe Post is particularly terrible in terms of sugar?  Let\’s keep going down the aisle…  The calorie counts vary, but it\’s the same deal here: 12 grams of sugar for a cup.  Again, these are dessert cereals, marketed as children\’s cereal.  As if you graduate from your sugar dependency at age 15 or something and after that only eat boring adult cereal.  (As an adult of over 30, I can safely say adults still eat dessert/\”kids\” cereal all the time.)

What about Life?  Not so much bright packaging and colorful cartoon characters aimed at kids that don\’t necessarily know better than to stuff sugar down their throats… but let\’s see the data.  10 grams of sugar per cup for the cinnamon flavor, and 8 for the original.  This is better, but really, not much.  I\’d still classify this as a dessert cereal, in all honesty.  Disappointing.

Maybe Raisin Bran?  That\’s healthy, right?  Raisins and toasted bran flakes should be nutritious.  

Emphasis on should, here.  This is actually the worst offender so far, at 17 grams of sugar per cup.  Why?  Well, not only has the cereal been sweetened, but also, raisins are dried fruit, which is like candy with fiber.  For added sugar, this is only 9 grams, which is the best so far… but it\’s still far too much to start your day with.  Or include in your day at all, really.  Sugar bomb!

Here\’s a better option.  While the calorie count is still frustratingly high, at 150+ calories per cup, the sugar is 3-4 grams per cup.  It\’s all added sugar, which is bad, but the levels are low enough that even if you doubled it, it\’s not going max out your sugar budget all at once.  

That said, this is still ultra-processed grains, meaning it\’s best to avoid it.  Also, definitely do not make the muddy buddies recipe they\’re advertising on the front there, because that pretty much just adds sugar and more sugar.  

Our best contender so far.  Marketed as healthy, which… it\’s still ultra-processed grains and 140 calories per cup serving, but at 2 grams of sugar, it\’s the clear winner so far.  Mind you, this is only the basic version.  If you opt for frosted variants all bets are off.  

After chicken, it\’s on to fish.  Filets, sticks, shapes, sandwich patties…  This is actually only a small part of the seafood section, but it was here, so here it is.  

Welcome back to my autism-aware shopping trip through the grocery store.  Week by week, I\’m showing you what the store sells, prune down the selection to what\’s safe for me (because autistic people can have very sensitive systems) and point out various gotchas the store tries to make you buy stuff you didn\’t come for. 

As a reminder, I shop with the following conditions in mind:

• dairy-free
• low sugar
• avoid ultraprocessed junk
• avoid food coloring
• conditional vegetarianism
• avoid high histamine foods
• awareness of gluten-free options and sugar-free options

Okay? Moving on, then.  To the only-slightly-more-honest of drugs: alcohol!

I am not much of an alcohol afficianado, so this is going to be a relatively quick tour.  The alcohol section actually comprises three aisles, not one.  As you can see, it\’s not arranged in an aisle fashion so much as an interconnected series of themed sections.  There is still order to the chaos, though, as we\’ll see.

While it\’s a state- and society-approved drug, never forget that alcohol is a drug, and you\’re effectively poisoning your brain when you consume it.  It can have interesting effects on autistic people, even making us feel almost \”normal\” after a certain amount.  But of course, the first thing alcohol affects is your judgement.  I\’ve read stories of autistic people adopting the bar-hopping way of life because that was the only way they could experience human connection.  Suffice it to say these stories typically did not end well.

This first and largest area is devoted to wine.  All kinds of wine.  Including, as you can see, refrigerated options for people that didn\’t have time to plan ahead.  I didn\’t realize canned wine was a thing, but here it is in many varieties.  Bottle or can form, chilled for your convenience.  These are all sugar bombs, even the typical bottles of wine, by the way.  Wine is fermented with sugar, and then often sweetened with more sugar to be palatable.  

Single-serve bottles and juice-box style containers.  Dear me.  Continuing down the aisle finds us the sparkling stuff.  As I mentioned before, I\’m not fond of carbonation.  It\’s okay if it\’s relatively gentle, but pop typically isn\’t, and neither are some of these options here.  

Just to the left of all this are specific sections for each type of wine.  This was the Cabernet Sauvignon section. My father could probably rattle off what each type of wine is like, but apparently in lieu of a guide, the store decor itself will try to help you.  

The Merlot, Zinfandel, and Malbec sections.  There were several more aisles just like this, but you get the idea.  Note the \”10% off any 4 wine bottles\” deal.  A boon to alcoholics everywhere.  

Was 10% off not enough?  Here\’s the really inexpensive bottles, and some free advice for serving sizes.  

Quantity in a glass bottle insufficient for drinking yourself under a table?  Here\’s the big box wines.  Presumably the quality isn\’t great, but for that price, it\’s never been so economical to be a socially-appropriate alcoholic.  

I may have an opinion about all this, can you tell?  

After we pass the wine, we get the only alcohol I gave two figs for when I was 21: the hard stuff.  Rum, vodka, tequila, gin, and cognac, among others.  When I turned 21 I decided I was going to find out my tolerance to alcohol, its effects on me, and how wary I should be of it.  I skipped right past wine because no alcohol tastes good to me, so why bother with the gentle stuff when I could just drink something significantly more effective in smaller quantities? 

I learned a few things.  First, that I could increase my tolerance and ability to recognize how inebriated I was with practice.  Second, that my personality doesn\’t particularly change when I\’m drunk, I simply have reduced judgement and capabilities.  And third, that hangovers are as godawful as they\’re written about in books (and 100% optional if you\’re smart about things).

After I answered those questions for myself, I stopped drinking as much, and then at all save in social company or on rare occasions.  At this point, I think I have a sugary alcoholic beverage maybe once every 2-3 months.  My tolerance has reduced itself accordingly, and it now takes very little alcohol now to make me tipsy.  

I also have the uncanny ability to recognize when something is alcoholic, right down to tasting a teensy amount of it in a dessert I had at a restaurant once.  That was only relevant because one of the other diners was avoiding alcohol like the plague, so she had to set aside her dessert because of it.  Alcohol and some other drugs give me the sensation that something is burning, painlessly, in my stomach.  It\’s kind of a useless superpower, but it\’s mine.  

If you looked carefully in the hard liquor picture, you could spot this display tablet.  It has moving pictures and makes sounds.  You can use it to look up recipes…

Including ones significantly harder to puzzle out than this one, natch.  

You could also use it to look up specific boozes and get… well, someone\’s opinion on how they taste, I guess.  Taste buds and experiences vary quite a bit, actually.  What you taste when you drink something, and what a professional wine taster (or rum taster, I guess) tastes, are likely to be very very different.

I presume these screens serve two purposes.  First, they\’re advertising.  I didn\’t watch them for very long, but they were peppered throughout the section to tell you about specific brands and do cool animations that make alcohol look enticing.  

Second, they save the store a great deal of staffing cost by simply automating the answers to, \”how do I make cocktail X?\” \”What does alcohol Y taste like?\” and \”What booze should I buy?\”

Just like there were sections for wine, there were also sections for whiskey based on geographic location.  This was the US section, but there was also a section for Ireland and several other countries that I guess specialize in making it.  Presumably whiskey is the alcohol of choice for toxic masculinity in this area, or something.  I can\’t imagine why it would have so much shelf space otherwise.

Yeah, you knew we\’d get there eventually.  Now entering the Other Sugar Bombs and beer section.  

Hard ciders and sodas are sugar bombs with booze.  Of all the booze in the store, I pretty much only drink hard cider at this point.  I found one particular European important brand with some neat flavor combinations, bought of a ton of it, and proceded to not give a crap ever since. 

The big brands of beer, I guess?  I\’m not going to lie, I barely know any of these.  

Craft beer has caught on in much of the US in the last 5 years or so. I don\’t entirely hate the trend since it can spark interest in supporting local brands.  However, in some cases people literally just pour brand name beer into fancy cans, seal them up, then charge a premium for it.  

Craft brewing is especially popular here in my city.  At least one of the brands in this picture can quite literally be found downtown.  I\’ve literally had a drink and food at the pub off their brewery.  

A little bit of extra horror for the recovering alcoholic: more adult juice boxes.  I\’ve seen these positioned everywhere in the store, from the impulse buys on the way in, to sitting in the middle of the fruits and vegetables, mocking your desire to leave without buying anything unhealthy.  

As a final note, these two sections, the pop and the booze, sit next to the snacks sections, which are themselves behind the various cooking staples.  The other side, which we\’ll get to next time, is the frozen foods.  So basically a complete shopping trip will always have you going past the ultra-processed snacks, sugar waters, and double-poisons sections.  

I always assumed there was a method behind my grocery store\’s organization, but only now am I seeing how truly manipulative and abusive it is.  And you get to see it with me.  Sorry/You\’re welcome.  

Welcome back to my autism-aware shopping trip through the grocery store.  Week by week, I\’m showing you what the store sells, prune down the selection to what\’s safe for me (because autistic people can have very sensitive systems) and point out various gotchas the store tries to make you buy stuff you didn\’t come for. 

As a reminder, I shop with the following conditions in mind:

• dairy-free
• low sugar
• avoid ultraprocessed junk
• avoid food coloring
• conditional vegetarianism
• avoid high histamine foods
• awareness of gluten-free options and sugar-free options

Cheesy snacks.  Cheetos of various kinds, cheese puffs, nacho cheese chips, and a slice in the middle for specialty chips and snacks.  

Kettle cooked chips.  This is a particular frying process that turns out a particularly tasty chip.  Note the dizzying variety of flavors.  This is the US, after all.  

And at last, we hit what USians typically imagine when \”chips\” is mentioned.  Potato chips, with ripples or not.  Barbecue, sour cream and onion, salt and vinegar, or original, it\’s all here.  

And lastly, in case you weren\’t satisfied with the size of all these bags… the party section.  Complete with party-sized salsas and nacho cheeses.  A much more limited selection (and some of everything to boot), but the bag is large enough to give you several days\’ worth of nutritionally-deficient calories.

Next aisle!  

Juice the Second (remember the refrigerated stuff in the first post?), powdered additives for your water, and, well, water.  And products thereof.  

We start off with bottled water.  Hey, remember how the PH (how acidic or basic) of bottled water varies dramatically?  Be careful with your teeth when you buy this stuff.  Also, all those plastic bottles add up really fast, recyclable or no.  

More bottled water, with varying PHs and bottle designs.  At the top where you can\’t see very well, there\’s actually a juicebox-like design.  I truly have no idea whether it\’s better for the environment, but at least one brand opines that it is, I guess.

Canned, carbonated, and flavored water.  Beware the flavoring, it can come with a boatload of sugar.

Impulse buy cap in the middle of the aisle, connecting this aisle to the pop aisle.  The sale is pretty good, at least if you want these products.  

We were promised powdered drinks, and here they are.  Lemonade in powder form, various flavor additives, Kool-Aid, and hyper-concentrated liquids to color and flavor your water.  Artificial colors run rampant in this section, and so do sweeteners.  I have thankfully reached a point in my life where I\’m pretty content just drinking water without extra flavor, so I typically give this whole section a miss.  It\’s a huge industry, though, as you can see.  

It begins!  We move from flavored \”sports water\” (ie: \”we put salt in this and covered the ick factor with sweeteners and flavoring!\”) to actual flavored drinks. More on the latter later, but a reminder to beware of those sweeteners and flavorings… and also the artificial colors.   

The \”sports water\” becomes Gatorade and similar ideas.  Salted sweet beverages that may hydrate and refresh you, but at the cost of filling you with garbage artificial food coloring and possibly sugar.  

Let\’s have a look at one of these zero sugar options…  

I\’ll give them credit for coloring with vegetable juice, but to my complete lack of surprise, their sweetener is sucralose.  That\’s a big NOPE from me.  

Remember how this was the juice aisle?  We start that business with vegetable juice.  Now, you might recall that juice is a deceptive sugar-bomb from Juice the First, back in the very first post of this series.  

But surely vegetable juice is different, right?  Vegetables aren\’t as sweet, and they\’re more full of vitamins and minerals.  

Wellll, prepare to be disappointed.  This wasn\’t a great picture but that\’s 7 grams of sugar in an 8 ounce serving.  They had to sweeten this up to make it tolerable.  (Also, I\’ve tried vegetable juice and was unimpressed regardless of the sugar content, but that\’s a personal preference.)  

Tomato juice is about the same deal.  I will grant you the calorie count is pretty low, but that 6 grams of sugar for an 8 ounce glass is definitely not okay.  Remember, a whole day\’s serving of sugar is 15 grams.  Two glasses of this and you\’re basically done for the day.  

Let\’s compare to the flavored waters, though!  Vitamin Water sounds healthy, right?  Maybe not, with those 26 grams of sugar in one single-serve bottle.  

Something a bit less deceptive?  Seems promising at first, with zero calories and zero carbs and sugars, but check what it\’s sweetened with: sucralose.  That\’s a nope.  

We get some relief from the disappointment train of this whole aisle with Sobewater, which has opted to sweeten its product with stevia.  The nutritional benefits are still minimal, but at least this product isn\’t going to quietly kill you when you drink it.  It\’s been colored with beta carotene, too, which you\’ll know as the same substance that gives carrots their orange color.  

Also less disappointing, Bai appears to be trying to reduce their poisonous impact while still providing a tasty beverage.  Erythritol (a sugar alcohol) and stevia sweeten this lemonade, and it\’s colored with vegetable juice.  I\’ve seen worse.   

After the veggie juice comes more typical juices.  You\’ve got your grape and your cranberry and apple, but there\’s also odder stuff like cherry and grapefruit.  Also cran-??? mixes.  But no peach juice, and I\’m going to whine about that forever. 

As I mentioned before, juice is pretty much just sugar water with some extra vitamins.  Let\’s have a look.  8 ounces will net you 150 calories and a whopping 36 grams of sugar.  Yikes!  I like grape juice, but for that amount of sugar I\’d rather have ice cream.  

Was the name brand any better?  Nope!  Bonus points for trying to add some fiber back into your sugar water, I guess, but grapes would make a better snack for a variety of reasons.  

Apple juice isn\’t much better.  28 grams of sugar and 120 calories for 8 ounces.  

The juice aisle deteriorates into stuff that\’s unapologetically sugar water.  So I looked into an old favorite to see how it compares.  8 ounces of artificially colored sugary garbage water will run you 11 grams of sugar and 40 calories.  What the heck?  Is this better for you than the juice?

Not really.  It\’s because they\’re cheating with sucralose on top of their high fructose corn syrup sweetener.  Definitely don\’t drink this.  Probably don\’t drink the juice, too, but definitely don\’t drink this.

The fruit juice-derivative products melt into unapologetic flavored sugar water, which I won\’t bother getting pictures of.  It\’s tasty and utterly terrible for you.  We all know you don\’t drink Kool-Aid to be healthy.  

To my distaste, though, that section finishes with convenience juice boxes, which I did snag a couple pictures of, but first, one more disappointment…

Fruit punch.  Zero sugar.  Even a mix of fruit juices.  And, right near the end of the middle… sucralose.  Curse you, drink companies!  

I have rather fond memories of this particular brand and its various flavors.  So let\’s look at their nutrition.  177 ml (one environmentally irresponsible pouch) is about 6 ounces of product.  You get three kinds of juice, 13 grams of sugar, and zero nutrition.  Well, at least it\’s honest.  

The \”healthy\” option.  100% fruit juice seems healthier, but as we are now painfully aware, it is not.  The healthier option has the same sized pouch, but will now cost you 20 grams of sugar instead of 13.  Yikes.  

Let\’s dispense with the illusion of healthiness and go find another childhood favorite.  0% juice, it says right on the box.  354 ml for two pouches divides perfectly to 177 ml, which is the same serving size as the CapriSun above.  16 grams of sugar, and it\’ll taste even sweeter because it\’s laced with sucralose.  I guess it really is worse than the CapriSun… but the best possible option so far has been the regular CapriSun.  

One more, because I couldn\’t resist after seeing the brand name.  Honest (Kids).  Surely it must be healthy?  It has a juice content!  (We know that means nothing now.)  

Actually, as sugar water goes, these were the best environmentally-irresponsible juice boxes in the aisle. 8-9 grams of sugar (or about 2/3rds your daily sugar intake) in 200 ml, or about 6.75 ounces.  There\’s no artificial colors or sweeteners, but this shouldn\’t be fed to children, ever.  Or humans in general, really. Maybe hummingbirds? 

This side of the aisle ends in bottled cold teas.  Various kinds, green and black and even herbal in some cases.  Many flavorings.  Most branded to tell you they\’re healthy.  But are they?  

Something called Pure Leaf ought to be healthy.  It\’s even caffeine-free so it won\’t keep you up at night.  What\’s this 27 grams of sugar doing there?  The caffeine might be missing, but this is definitely not a bedtime beverage!  Props for the very short ingredient list, at least.  Tea, sugar, extra flavor, and flower extract for color.  Too much sugar, though.  Wayyyy too much sugar.

Is the organic version any better?  If you guessed \”no,\” you have clearly been paying attention.  20 grams of sugar is not healthy.  This is tea-flavored sugar water, and so was the first one.  

And this is where I started being really grateful I was wearing a face mask, because it\’s harder to read someone\’s utterly disgusted and disbelieving expression from the side when their mouth and nose are covered.  

\”Honest\” organic tea.  \”Just a tad sweet.\”  Your \”just a tad sweet\” is more than my daily recommended intake of sugar, Honest.  I\’ll give them bonus points for using Fair Trade tea leaves and sugar cane, but I will not be putting any of this sugar water in my system or recommending anyone else do so, thank you.  

Bai again.  Remember these guys from the lemonade section?  Yeah, they\’re here in the tea section too, offering their spin on a less-awful-for-you tea-flavored sugar water.  Erythritol again, backed up with stevia.  If you absolutely can\’t give up your flavored tea drinks, this is probably your best option.

Welcome back to my autism-aware shopping trip through the grocery store.  Week by week, I\’m showing you what the store sells, prune down the selection to what\’s safe for me (because autistic people can have very sensitive systems) and point out various gotchas the store tries to make you buy stuff you didn\’t come for. 

As a reminder, I shop with the following conditions in mind:

• dairy-free
• low sugar
• avoid ultraprocessed junk
• avoid food coloring
• conditional vegetarianism
• avoid high histamine foods
• awareness of gluten-free options and sugar-free options

Unlike weeks prior, I\’m literally going to walk the whole way down one side of this aisle, then come back for the other side.  There\’s no continuity between one side and the other, so it makes the most sense to do it this way.

Maybe fittingly for someone that makes stuff from scratch a lot, we start with broth and stock.  There\’s a dozen varieties of chicken broth and beef broth.  Why, I have no idea.  It\’s pretty basic stuff.  Notice what\’s missing, by the way?  Beef and chicken are major meats, but… we\’re missing pork products here.  Ham stock is a thing, but you can\’t buy it here.  Or most anywhere in the US.  Why?  I\’m not 100% sure, but I\’d bet the pet food industry is a factor.  

I always opt for the third option presented here, by the way: vegetable broth.  It definitely doesn\’t have the same flavor in soups and such, but it\’s not that big of an adjustment in recipes.  

Into your basic canned soups.  Most soup is off limits to me, because the base is often chicken.  If not chicken, probably beef.  I still eat tomato soup, and cheese-based soups are also a thing, but both have their failings (high histamines and dairy, respectively).  Cream of ____ is also not a good plan, because more dairy.  

Yep.  The soup aisle comes with its own snack section.  This isn\’t even the only snack section in this side of the aisle.  I\’m sure the manufacturers would style these \”lunch options\” or something that doesn\’t contain the word \”snack\” but.  Come on.  These aren\’t big or thick enough to be a whole meal, and they certainly don\’t have enough vegetable content.  Beyond the convenience bit, more canned soups.  Soup isn\’t that hard to make, but cracking open a can is even easier.  You have your choice of brand, too.  

The soup section tapers off into this.  \”But we were already in the pasta section last time!\” you might protest.  Yeah, I don\’t know either.  Anyway, here\’s the ramen.  Friend of budgeteers everywhere, this stuff will give you calories… but it has basically no nutritional content.  The ones that say chicken and beef and whatever, though?  They definitely have chicken or beef content, so those are out for me.  

On the far right side, Snacks the Second, with the Cup O\’ Noodles type of packages.  Add hot water, stir after a couple minutes, and consume.  You pay extra money for that packaging, though, and of course it goes right in the trash when you\’re done, and then into the landfill.  

This is actually more Snacks the Second, rather than Snacks the Third.  I guess one section of convenience soups wasn\’t sufficient.  These are actual cans, but they have an easy-open top, so you don\’t need to retrieve the can opener.  The options here vary, but they\’re all Italian-influenced ones.  Canned ravioli seems kind of gross in theory, but if you\’re hungry enough, it\’s tasty.  

I get to skip this section almost entirely because of the meat and dairy content.  

Speaking of meat content!  Did you know canned chicken is a thing?  I don\’t know how you\’re allowed to call something fresh if it\’s been canned, but uh.  This exists, at any rate.  I associate that can shape with tuna, not chicken, but I guess it serves either way.

The tuna fish still exists, naturally.  Along with sardines, shrimp, salmon, and mackerel.  The fishing industry has apparently responded at some point to the fears of heavy metals in their products, because there\’s no reason to name your brand SafeCatch otherwise.  Also, see at the top right there?  Snack tuna fish.  

You may also have Spam, corned beef, and canned chili (with or without beans).  I have never knowingly ingested Spam, and I probably never will.  I\’m told it\’s an acquired taste.  For something like this, \”acquired taste\” means, to me, \”this is bad and you have to trick yourself into believing it\’s good.\”

On to the crackers, which are the other side of the aisle.  So many crackers.

So hey, remember how there\’s a snack section in basically every aisle so far?  We\’re now reaching the actual snack aisles.  I\’ll try to be more specific than just stating that everything is ultraprocessed…

For example, Cheezits.  Tasty.  Low sugar, even.  Dairy, though.  Same with Goldfish crackers.  Like almost everything in this aisle, not gluten-friendly.  

I made sure to get a picture of this section specifically.  Triscuits and Wheat Thins are two brands you can consume with less worry about your guts afterwards.  Both have used whole grains in their production processes from the beginning.  If you absolutely have to serve crackers and your party-goers aren\’t sensitive to gluten, either of these will do in a pinch.  

If your party-goers are gluten-sensitive, though, here\’s your section.  I\’m sorry to say I haven\’t tried most of these, but at least they exist.  

Saltines.  Someone once told me saltines are only eaten when you\’re sick because if you can\’t keep them down, you haven\’t wasted food you care about.  Apologies to anyone who does like saltines.  Note the brown version in the middle.  I say \”brown\” because it actually says nothing about the whole grain content.  And of course all saltines are made from wheat flour, so…  

Extra-snacky crackers and cookies, packaged in small containers for your convenience.  I\’m actually not sure why cookies are sneaking into this aisle, except that I guess it\’s the same packaging setup.  Little plastic sleeves with sandwiched crackers and cheese paste, or cookies with frosting paste.  Favorite grab snacks for events and lunches, in my experience.  Again, it\’s ultraprocessed, nutritionless, and sometimes even sugar bombs.  

Are graham crackers a cracker or a cookie?  They\’re sweet, so I kind of want to say cookie.  Regardless, here they are.  You may have your choice of five basic brands, plus shaped snack versions because this is the US and we must have our snacks.  Watch the sugar content on the snack versions, it tends to be higher to appeal to children more.

And last but not least for this aisle, cookies.  Yes, cookies are now crackers.  Don\’t look at me, I don\’t know.  Anyway, we have now shed any pretense of healthiness.  These are unrepentantly sugar-bombs, with some \”sugar free\” exceptions.  

And then there\’s this, which is the very best I could find in the aisle.  100 calories and 3 grams of sugar for 25 grams of granola bar.  I actually bought one of these.  They taste okay, but they\’re tiny and don\’t have a very strong flavor.  The texture also leaves something to be desired… but that\’s compared to sugar bombs, after all.  

I typically don\’t take pictures of the endcaps/impulse buys… but this was too much to stomach.  So, bonus horror, found by the spice aisle:

Did you know Family Time means sugar bombs?  I didn\’t realize family time needed to involve poisoning myself.  Thanks for clearing that up, grocery store!

Welcome back to my autism-aware shopping trip through the grocery store.  Week by week, I\’m showing you what the store sells, prune down the selection to what\’s safe for me (because autistic people can have very sensitive systems) and point out various \”gotchas\” the store tries to make you buy- stuff you didn\’t come for and don\’t need. 

As a reminder, I shop with the following conditions in mind:

• dairy-free
• low sugar
• avoid ultraprocessed junk
• avoid food coloring
• conditional vegetarianism
• avoid high histamine foods
• awareness of gluten-free options and sugar-free options

Welcome back to my autism-aware shopping trip through the grocery store.  Week by week, I\’m showing you what the store sells, prune down the selection to what\’s safe for me to eat (because autistic people can have very sensitive systems) and point out various \”gotchas\” the store tries to make you buy- stuff you didn\’t come for and don\’t need.  

As a reminder, I shop with the following conditions in mind:

• dairy-free
• low sugar
• avoid ultraprocessed junk
• avoid food coloring
• conditional vegetarianism
• avoid high histamine foods
• awareness of gluten-free options and sugar-free options

Last week was the impulse purchases on the way into the store, the yogurt, and the juice, coffee, and tea sections.  We learned that fruit juice and yogurt are a trap (check the sugar levels!), snack foods tend to sneak into every section in the store, and that the PH of bottled water varies quite widely.

This week: the rest of the dairy aisle, and then the baking aisle and friends!  Canned fruit, sugar, flour, PB&J.

The milk section.  All of this is moo juice.  Seriously.  I don\’t know how many kinds of milk a person really needs, but I once heard a guy from Europe make jokes about exactly this.  We have skim, 1% milkfat, 2% milkfat, whole milk, high protein milk, buttermilk, milk laced with omega 3 fatty acids, and \”humane\” (questionable) milk.  We have most of these varieties in 4-5 brands, including a store brand.  Who on Earth needs that much decision paralysis?  

By the way, I can\’t drink any of this or I\’ll have a massive mood crash.  Moving on!

Coffee creamer.  Yes, all four of those doors.  Once again, I don\’t drink coffee.  But keep in mind the sugar content of those flavored things.  Because yeah.  Sugar bomb!  (There are some dairy-free options in there if I ever decided to start making lattes and such though.)

Sour cream, cottage cheese, snacks related to both those things, and flavored varieties.  I sulked a little bit when I saw the cottage cheese.  I used to love cottage cheese.  I still do, but it hates me (dairy!), so I basically never buy it any more.  It\’s a dratted shame, because there\’s a really good waffle recipe that uses it and I miss that too.

Hey, remember the milk section and choice paralysis?  Welcome to the egg section!  We have several brands of eggs, but we also have confusing labels!  \”Cage free\” is supposed to mean the birds are never caged, but there\’s no regulation for the label, so it effectively means nothing!  Hooray…  

If that label is there, the animals involved with the product were fed appropriate food (chickens are omnivores fyi), had appropriate space, and were treated like living creatures rather than objects to produce profit.  I love finding this label on animal products, but it\’s fairly rare unfortunately.  The Certified Humane website has their standards transparently available on their website for anyone that cares to read them.  You don\’t need a degree in Animal Sciences to understand it, either.  I don\’t know exactly what a bell drinker is (some kind of water container for chickens), but I don\’t particularly need to.  

If this seems very small for the block cheese section, it\’s because this is the \”regular\” block cheese.  If you want the fancy block cheese you gotta go to a different part of the store, specifically the far side of the fruits and vegetables section.

Directly after the block cheese is… snacks.  Yeah.  String cheese, cheese bites, dips, cheese spread (part 1).  While the cheese itself is only bad for you because it\’s dairy, the stuff they package with the cheese is often a convenient hiding place for sugar or ultraprocessed garbage.  For example, crackers and pretzels are devoid of nutritional content (but boy they\’re cheap).  Cream cheese is often laden with sugar, never mind the bagel chips.  And of course cheese spreads often have a higher sugar content because, once again, sugar gets everywhere.

After the snacks (part 1) we get into a truly staggering number of shredded cheese options.  I had to stand a good ways down an aisle to get this picture.  You\’ll notice that for how big this section is, it\’s really only two brands offered plus a smattering of smaller ones at the right end.  The US loves its cheese, though, clearly.  

We then move to the conveniently sliced cheese, in case you wanted perfectly square thin slices of cheese.  Also for if you\’re too lazy to buy a block and slice your own.  I\’m pretty sure most USians fall into the latter camp.  Again, I can\’t eat any of this because it will tank my mood faster than you can say, \”But why would we eat this much dairy if it\’s so bad for us?\”

Remember how we had snacks already?  Yeah, well.  Now it\’s more snacks time.  This is where the cheese section meets the meats section, so these snacks have both.  Shoutout to Lunchables, which I never buy anymore for obvious reasons but miss having sometimes.  Also?  The vast majority of USian humans do not lack for protein in our diets, so these snacks are pretty superfluous.  Moreso than most snacks, I mean.  I guess as snacks go they\’re at least somewhat healthier than other snacks?  At any rate, they\’re both loaded with dairy and the meat is likely inhumanely produced, so I just keep walking…  

Notable mention to a tiny, tiny corner between the shredded cheese and the pre-sliced squares of cheese.  This is the dairy-free section, and this is all you get.  One brand, two shredded cheese flavors, two sliced cheese flavors, and no blocks of cheese at all.  

Suffice it to say I typically shop for cheese substitutes elsewhere.

And now, the baking aisle!  Lucky number 13.  Maybe it\’s only lucky for me and my spouse, but I\’ll take it.  

I\’m not sure why PB&J is a baking need, but whatever, I guess.  

Sugar and sweeteners are a special kind of hell for people who have to be careful with their bodies. There\’s a million non-sugar sweeteners and almost all of them are awful for you. 

So there\’s the classic: cane sugar.  My mother is allergic to it, which makes most of this aisle useless when keeping her needs in mind.  Mine, personally, simply revolve around not putting too much of this stuff into my system.  That\’s actually easier to do when you\’re making your own stuff, because then you literally control how much sugar goes into the recipe.  

Other options available here include your typical brown sugar (which is just cane sugar coated in molasses), corn syrups (eww…), various Stevia options (okay healthwise but not great for baking due to it not being a 1-to-1 substitute with sugar), agave syrups (fine, but only when liquid sweetener is an option), and sweetener blends.  

For the lattermost, the blends vary in their usefulness based on what\’s in them.  Most artificial sweeteners are bad news for the sensitive guts and leaky blood-brain-barriers of autistic people, so stuff like aspartame, saccharin, and sucralose are off the table.  

When I shop for sugar substitutes, I tend to buy sugar alcohols, like xylitol and erythritol, or better yet, a natural option like monk fruit sweetener.  When baking a recipe I\’m willing to experiment with, I\’ll typically substitute half the sugar for monk fruit or a mix of these natural sweeteners.  

Notably missing here is my mother\’s go-to for sugar: beet sugar.  Michigan grows a crop of sugar beets, and these can be turned into granulated sugar just like sugar cane can be.  For reasons unknown, beet sugar doesn\’t harm my mother.  So I\’ll cook with that sometimes.  

PB&J. Jam and jelly are basically just flavored sugar spreads, so I avoid them.  The only exception this year was my homemade black raspberry pulp, which I used as jam.  I figured that was pretty safe since they\’re packed full of fiber and nutrients.

The peanut butter is almost inevitably full of chemicals and sugar, never mind peanuts being a major allergy for many people. I use sunflower seed butter when I eat this kind of food, so this entire section is pretty much ignored.  

Honey. It\’s delicious and I love it, but obviously it\’s a high sugar product. Use sparingly. Also, ideally you want to buy local (within a couple miles) honey, because that\’s made with local pollen and can help end your allergies by teaching your white blood cells that the pollen isn\’t trying to kill you.  I\’ll sometimes pick up a semi-local variety from here, but mostly I try to buy from neighboring farms.  

Baking supplies.  It\’s 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic, so they\’re out of yeast. Again. Thankfully I have some at home.

They\’re also out of the largest packages of flour.  Most of the flour here is your typical bleached-to-death, glutinous white flour, bereft of nutrition.  This is the first way food goes badly wrong.  Most commercial processes use white flour when making their products, which means the results lack the nutrition and fiber that they could otherwise offer. There are some packages of whole wheat flour, at least.

It\’s not all wheat offerings, thankfully.  Quinoa flour, almond flour, flaxseed meal, cornmeal, hemp hearts, and coconut flour are also available here. Also, fortunately, a gluten-free option flour mix from a major company.  Oddly enough, this isn\’t my go-to spot for baking gluten-free (there\’s a different spot elsewhere), but it\’s at least an option.  

Canned fruit. Typically used for pie fillings and that\’s about it now. The industrial canning process for these destroys much of their nutrition. I had canned fruit on occasion growing up, but as I make my pie fillings fresh, there\’s little point in buying any.  Moving on!

Dried fruit, chopped nuts, and candy for adding to cookies and baked goods. The dried fruit is basically candy with fiber and some vitamins. The chopped tree nuts are common allergens, and also high in histamines, so best avoided. The chocolate chips and other candy, obviously, is just sugar bombs.

Marshmallows and jello. Both ultra-refined foods. Sugar and more sugar, too. Jello has been off my consumption list for years because of the gelatin, most commonly made from cow hoof or bone.  Marshmallows as well, but if you look in the lower left, there\’s some packages of a brand called Dandies.  Those are gelatin-free, so when I feel like a marshmallow-y treat, those are what I turn to.  

Cooking oils. More selection than you\’d expect, with various kinds of coconut oil, seed and nut oils, ghee, and a truly absurd number of olive oil options. Fun fact: US regulations for olive oil are more stringent than ones in Europe, so if you want good quality oil that\’s sure to be actual olive oil and not flavored whatever-other-oil-was-lying-around, buy extra-virgin olive oil from California.

Premade pie fillings and crusts. In all honesty, pie filling is really easy to make, so I\’m not really sure why these are sold save for the specific flavor, I guess?  At any rate, it\’s all sugar bombs, so we just keep walking…

Evaporated and powdered cow milks, and also milk alternatives (part 2).  Even more options!  Remember the almond milk, soy milk, and cashew milk?  You may also buy hemp milk, oat milk, flax milk, macademia milk… and even goat milk.  

Also, see those handy-grab healthy milk drinks at the top? 

Sugar bombs. Surprise!  Definitely don\’t give these to your kids unless you want them to have diabetes.  

Spices. There\’s eleventy billion of them, but at least most of them are safe. The spice mixes aren\’t as safe, as they may contain powdered chicken or beef or pork.  That\’s fine for most autistic people, but not for me. Regardless, making your own spice mixes is an adventure and cheaper to boot.

It\’s a bit dizzying to try to sort through this section looking for powdered thyme or what have you, but here at least, there\’s no sugar bombs hiding in wait.  

Unlike here:  baking mixes. Almost entirely laden in gluten, and highly processed too.  Biscuits, cornbread, pancakes, muffins, cookies, brownies, and cakes. The sugar content on the desserts is obvious, but the cornbread, pancakes, and biscuits might depress you.

Cake fixings.  Otherwise known as, \”Oh look, more sugar!\” Also artificial colors, which are often Very Bad News for autistic people. 

One parent of an autistic kid noticed specifically that her son reacted very poorly to the color red.  If red food coloring was in his food, it was going to be bad times after he\’d eaten it.  I try to avoid them myself, just in case.  

And that\’s those done!  Next time it\’ll be the pasta and \”world foods\” aisle, and we\’ll see what a US corporation thinks represents the world…