Fit Fare

When I first saw Morningstar Farms Veggie Bites advertised in a magazine, I was excited. Honestly. As a mom, I like anything that manages to be convenient AND healthy AND kid-friendly, or at least kid-tolerated. Plus, those bites looked pretty tasty. As soon as they started carrying them in my local grocery chain, I snapped up a box - without reading the nutrition facts label, which is not something I usually do. Serves me right. As it turns out, these nuggets are a sham. They’re not healthy, they’re not kid-friendly, they’re inconvenient, and I very much doubt they’ve ever seen a farm.

Turns out what I thought was a small health food company is actually owned by Kellogg’s, proud agri-business manufacturer of the Pop Tart. While their corporate website espouses the virtues of “integrity,” “nutritious products,” and “healthy lifestyles,” this particular frozen “health” food product is chock full of goodies like hydrogenated soybean oil (not even just partially hydrogenated!) unspecified artifical flavors, and TBHQ, a harmful preservative “antioxidant” (not the good kind of antioxidant).

Even though you have to bake them in the oven (check minus for the convenience factor, on top of everything else), I decided to make some and eat them anyway. I’m the kind of woman that sees things through. After all, the nuggets listed less than .5 grams of trans fat per serving, so if I only ate three, I’d be limiting my intake of nasty fake fats and artificial flavors to “acceptable” FDA limits.

They tasted exactly like the chicken nuggets we used to get in my school cafeteria - and these were meatless broccoli and cheddar nuggets. Delicious, oily, and very, very fake, with a slight artificial aftertaste I never would have noticed at the age of 11. At the risk of enraging a global food manufacturing concern, I advise you not to buy these nuggets. Not only are they not healthy, they’re addictive - I had to eat the whole tray of them to protect my family from trans fat consumption.

Yeah, that’s it.