Tuesday, March 10, 2009

artificial almond aromas

In what I hoped would convince Mac to eat eggs yesterday, I told him he could no longer eat Frosted Flakes on cereal day if he didn't try the egg. That threat didn't work, so yesterday I found myself at the grocery store looking through a handful of cereals to find something that appeared healthy to me but would look like punishment to Mac. The cereal part of a Brazilian grocery story is nothing like the cereal aisle in an American grocery store. There's granola, corn flakes, frosted flakes, bran flakes, and a few trendy-looking cereals (including one that promised to have me in a bikini if I followed the 14-day plan) and that's really it. Oh, except for the Honey Nut-O's.

Honey Nut-O's look like Honey Nut Cheerios. (As an aside, there were no regular Cheerios or those nice colorful, fruity ones like they sell in the US). Just the Honey Nut-O's.

I assumed that Honey Nut-O's had nuts in them (being a believer in truth in advertising and all) so I decided to read the ingredient list to see what kind of nut it contained as Mac has allergies to tree nuts. I read through the whole list, most of which I wouldn't have understood even if it had been in English, and found no nut products until I got to the last ingredient.

Honey Nut-O's contain the artificial aromas of honey and almonds. How weird is that and how do you add artificial aromas of something natural? I can understand artificial flavoring but smell??? I assumed there was little chance of anything nut-like in the aroma, so Mac ate it and loved it and not surprisingly, it didn't seem like punishment to him at all! I knew I should've chosen the plain old corn flakes...

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