A cracker that can unite us all*

[penfield]

"I live on good soup, not on fine words."
- Moliere (French playwright and actor)

On cold days like today, I enjoy a hot bowl of thick, creamy tomato soup for lunch. And I like to add a little texture to the soup by crunching up saltines and sprinkling them in the bowl.

Saltines -- the brand-names as well as their generic counterparts -- offer a "Fat-Free" cracker and a "Low Sodium" cracker, but they do not offer a fat-free AND low-sodium cracker. So every time I buy saltines, I have to think about whether I'm worried more about love handles or high blood pressure; do I prefer my arteries clogged or constricted? And then of course this requires some on-the-fly calculations about whether the soups in my pantry are themselves fat- or sodium-intensive. Yes, I could get the fancy oyster crackers, but those cost like five times as much as your basic saltines and somewhere in my head is the sneaking suspicion -- despite plainly obvious evidence -- that oyster crackers somehow contain oysters.

Anyway, It's a little annoying. Maybe one day, the eggheads at Nabisco will lock themselves in a lab and figure out some way to make a fat-free cracker without dumping salt on it. Sure, it will taste like cardboard, but at least my heart will be happy.

Comments

*

[enchanted-pants.livejournal.com]

Raise your hand if, at first, you thought this title was a reference to presidential candidate John Edwards.

Re: *

[mearth.livejournal.com]

I thought you meant the universally emotional stylings of Clay Aiken. So, same thing.

Re: *

[enchanted-pants.livejournal.com]

I don't know if you saw Clay Aiken's little hissy fit in the back pages of this week's Newsweek magazine, but it did little to quell my suspicion that Aiken is in his own emotional universe.

Re: *

[mearth.livejournal.com]

I did not. I was going to one-up you and say, "I don't read Entertainment Weekly." Then I re-read your comment and saw that you were talking about Newsweek. Newsweek, really? They better have been acquired but TMZ, or someone's over there is getting cut.

Soup, generally, has a lot of sodium already

[(Anonymous)]

And tomatoes are also naturally high in sodium (I believe). You should go with the sodium-free because at least you'll enjoy the taste of the fat, whereas you'd never notice a little extra salt in a can of soup.

This is the least angry comment I've left here in months. Here, let me try again:

Isn't it obvious? Big Soup has already larded up (no pun intended) your delicious bowl of Creamy Tomato (do they even MAKE creamy tomato anymore?) (Someone check with the Grand Marnier, assuming she ever posts ever again, that is) with enough salt for the population of East St. Louis. As if they don't have enough problems already.

Look, buy the salt-free and at least enjoy the fat that you're getting from it.

The end.

-- Josh