The Bread Winner

I live with a self-described "food elitist". She makes grocery lists that I am often tasked with filling... the lists say what I should buy but, for the most part, I have to rely on my home-schooling to know what not to buy. I don't always get it right. One week the list said "Hotdog buns (not the bad ones!)". Grocery lists are not supposed to have punctuation.

In college I learned about simple and complex carbohydrates, that starch is essentially a sugar and gets metabolized as such, but it took my wife to convince me that bread made from highly refined wheat is no better than a marshmallow loaf. It seems obvious, I guess... but my adoration for everything bread-like has kept me blinded by love.

I can't imagine life without bread. Heck, I can't even imagine LUNCH without bread! How do you pack a school lunchbox without a sandwich? Mind boggling! My family is fortunate, however, not to struggle with weight or diabetic tendency so bread stays on the menu at my behest.

It can be hard to find the right bread, though. Our grocery store probably stocks 100 (or more) different kinds of bread... and nearly every loaf declares something evil in its' ingredients list like "High Fructose Corn Syrup". Even I am on board with avoiding this industrially invented sweetener.

So there I am, shopping for the right hot dog bun... picking up one package after another and reading ingredient labels, looking for a winner with a focused intensity common to any guilty pleasure. Standing behind me was an older couple for whom my zealous efforts did not go unnoticed. I heard him say to her, "Watch this guy. Whatever he gets... we get".