in which we discover An unpleasant surprise in our coffee

I am something of a coffee hound. My fascination began in my late teens, as I experimented with heavily-sweetened coffee-like beverages. My tastes expanded as I went through technical school and became a respiratory therapist. As a chronic shift worker, I spent years drinking thoroughly mediocre coffee. Most of the hospitals I worked in had the cheapest coffee they could find, often made from recycled roofing tar and sadness. Some hospitals had marginally better coffee machines, but in general, the experience was mediocre.

Tired of drinking horrible coffee at work, I learned how to make good coffee at home. I learned about different roasts, bought a grinder and a French press, and developed an affinity for experimenting with various coffee making modalities. I also experimented with a variety of coffee seasonings. I’ll occasionally drink black coffee, but over time, my preference has become to enjoy my coffee with half-and-half and honey.

Why Half-and-half?

Half-and-half is a mix of heavy cream and milk. It is calibrated to be less thick than heavy cream, but not as thin as milk. Coffee with heavy cream is unpleasantly thick: heavy cream is generally best used in sauces or to make whipped cream. On the other side of the coin, coffee with milk is too thin: even 2% milk is a little too thin to give coffee the body I like, and skim milk is out of the question – I’d rather drink coffee black than with skim.

As the name suggests, the proper formulation of half-and-half is somewhere around 50% cream and 50% milk. The fat from the cream cuts the bitterness of the coffee and the texture and flavor of the dairy brings out the sweetness and floral notes in the honey and in the coffee. Imagine my shock, horror, and surprise when I randomly decided to read the ingredients on my half and half:

Not only is there no cream in this half and half, the second ingredient on the list is corn syrup. This product is mostly milk and corn syrup. This is not what I wanted when I bought half-and-half.

First of all, shame on me for not reading the ingredients sooner. I’ve been on an ingredients kick lately and the amount of non-food ingredients in my food is both shocking and disturbing to me. But second of all, why the hell is there corn syrup in my half-and-half?

corn syrup

Corn syrup is, as the name would suggest, a syrup made from naturally occurring corn sugars. Industrial food processors take trainloads of corn, do a bunch of industrial stuff to it, and pump out barrels and barrels of corn syrup, which is added as an ingredient in countless foods that we eat every day. Corn syrup is slightly different from high-fructose corn syrup, which undergoes additional processing to be made sweeter.

Corn syrup is often found in food as an additive that provides a certain texture, prevents crystallization, and can impact sweetness. It seems like it is in everything. I suspect this is largely due to the horrifying state of American food manufacturing, which is built entirely around the desire of large companies to manufacture food-like products on the cheap with minimal oversight, which then translates to agricultural subsidies through the lobbying bribery process. Industrial processors bring briefcases of cash to politicians, who then pass whatever bills the processors want. It’s corruption and greed all the way down.

The truth is that our entire food system is oriented around the desire of large companies to return more money to shareholders, and not around the desire to feed human beings nutritious and wholesome food. They would feed us plastic if they could get away with it. That simple fact is why there is corn syrup in my coffee creamer: it’s subsidized, it makes the product cheaper to manufacture, and while it does technically add some sweetness and texture to my half and half, I do not want corn syrup in my goddamn coffee.

Whatcha gonna do, cry about it?

So what am I going to do about this?

First: I’m going to check ingredients before I buy food from now on. This is a wake-up call. I need to be more vigilant about what I eat. I do not want to consume corn syrup in my coffee. I want half-and-half that is just cream and milk, not milk, corn syrup, carrageenan, and all the other garbage that the industrial processors so thoughtfully added.

Second: I’m going to avoid buying this brand again. The only language these companies understand is money. I will simply spend my money elsewhere.

Third: I may write a letter to the company that made this product and express my grievances with them. I should not have to be so vigilant when buying a product that has a simple formula. Half-and-half should be half cream and half milk, not half milk and half corn syrup. Letters are old-fashioned but in my experience they’re anachronistic enough to generally elicit a human response.

Read the labels

If nothing else, this has been a wake-up call for me. For a long time, I haven’t bothered to pay close attention to the foods I’ve been eating. But now I find myself wondering: what else am I eating without knowing about it? What other additives, chemicals, preservatives, and assorted nonsense is in the food I eat? How is that affecting my health? Sure, sure, these ingredients are added under “oversight” from the FDA, but the FDA also allows companies to just say “trust me bro” and add whatever they want to food. And companies run by avaricious, greedy executives whose sole incentive is to increase shareholder value would surely never poison people on purpose for profit…right?

One doesn’t need to look far to realize that Americans are not a healthy people, and I for one believe that a major cause of that is probably the American diet, which is full of nonsense ingredients and heavily-processed foods. Slowly but surely, one additive at a time, one surreptitious addition of corn syrup or preservatives or whatever at a time, we are being fed nonsense food that is not good for us or good for the world in which we live. For me, this has been an incident of awakening. I thought I was eating well overall, but now it’s time to go check all the ingredients and get a lot more selective about what I eat. It’s time to throw off the yoke of industrial nonsense food and begin feeding my body things that are actually nutritious. The time has come to live better. And the first stop for me is learning about ingredients and being a lot more selective about what I allow into myself.

Fuck this corn syrup half and half. I’ll drink my coffee black, thank you very much.