Nutella: Solving the Mystery

I bought some cashew butter recently because… well, because I can. And I was curious. Almond butter is delicious and nutty and almost “light” tasted compared to peanut butter, which I still love, but cashew butter is basically like dessert. I made the mistake of eating it for the first time at 7:00 AM and almost passed out from rich-ness overload. Suddenly the phone rings, it’s the school… “Monika? Hello..? Monika..?” and there I am, curled up on the kitchen floor in Cashew Butter Stupor.

While I ate the cashew butter I began to ponder other spreadable sweet things and Nutella came to mind. I had a fairly food-secluded childhood – I actually ate real food like vegetables and potatoes and rice and meat. On the one hand, it means I have an ingrained love of unprocessed food, but on the other hand it means I missed out on fascinating things like Macaroni and Cheese, Nutella, and …. all that other stuff in the aisles of the grocery store.

So this leads me to solving the mystery: what IS nutella?

Did you know that ingredient lists are always in order of what the products contains the MOST of, gradually winding down to whatever it contains the least of, proportionally speaking. Guess what the first ingredient is in Nutella?

SUGAR – 2 tablespoon of nutella contain 21 grams of sugar. Equivalent to drinking a can of Coca Cola. Breakfast ?! Yuck!

PALM OIL – comes from the pulp of the fruit of the oil palm. Contains both saturated and unsaturated fats. 2 tbsp of nutella gives you 11 grams of fat, equivalent of eating a tablespoon of butter or two slices of salami.

HAZELNUTS – wow, something real! But also means: more fat.

COCOA – fresh from abused labourers in northern Africa: mmmm, more sugar!

REDUCED MINERAL WHEY – wtf? indeed, indeed…whey is good for you, but this “reduced” whey has had all the beneficial minerals sucked out of it. Basically, it gives nutella a “milky” flavor, but no “milky” goodness.

LECITHIN (as emulsifier) – I think wikipedia describes this one best: “a generic term to designate any group of yellow-brownish fatty substances occurring in animal and plant tissues.” Deeeee-lish!

VANILLIN – proudly declared as “an artificial flavor” on the package. This SHOULD be real vanillla extract, but now it’s artificially produced from a byproduct of the paper mill / pulp industry. No joke.

This all led to another great discovery: Europeans didn’t know about chocolate or vanilla until 1520!! That’s wild!! Meanwhile, the Aztecs and everyone else in South America were laughing at the deprived, sexually repressed Europeans.

The oldest evidence of cacao beans (what chocolate comes from, you morons!) being used as food by humans was dated back to 1400 B.C. from Honduras. This is one more reason I’m heading to this part of the world as soon as possible – they know what’s important: chocolate, rainforest, dancing, LIFE, and all the other details

Anyway, back to Nutella: did you know all the nutella eaten in the USA is manufactured in Canada? Specifically in Brantford, Ontario. Imagine owning property across the street from the nutella factory. The smell would be… well, disgusting pretty damn quick.

Who came up with this concoction? Signore Pietro Ferrero. A dude living in the northwest of Italy where there was a cocoa shortage in the 40s. He decided chocolate could be replaced with mushed hazelnuts and a heck of a lot of sugar. Basically a war time chocolate replacement, and look how long its lasted! Almost as popular as pantyhose (another war time creation).

Nutella is marketing itself as a main component of a healthy breakfast. hahahhhhahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaahhaha
Right.
Just what I want to feed the future generations of humankind: sugar, with fat, with more sugar, with more fat, topped off with a mineral-less powder and some yellowy-brown fat gunk.