social awareness guide #1: read the labels

Most people don't read labels carefully, especially ingredients labels. It's not a bad habit to have. If you're in the supermarket, looking to buy something, take a minute to look at what's inside. More importantly, teach your kids or students to do it. You can even make it into a fun activity, by having them ask questions about what they're consuming.

As an example, here are the listed ingredients in my can of Campbell's Chunky Grilled Sirloin Steak with Hearty Vegetables. Yum!

• Water
• Potatoes
• Grilled seasoned sirloin beef (contains up to 10% of a solution of water, salt, sodium phosphate)
• Carrots
• Tomato puree (water, tomato paste)
• Corn
• Diced tomatoes in tomato juice
• Green beans
• Modified food starch

Contains less than 2% of the follwoing ingredients:

• Beef flavor base (roasted beef including natural juices, salt, hydrolyzed soy and corn protein, corn oil, onion powder, grill flavor, beef fat, caramel color, disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate, beef flavor, garlic powder, spice)
• Dehydrated onions
• Vegetable flavor base (sauteed vegetables - carrots, celery, onions), sugar, salt, corn oil, autolyzed yeast extract and natural flavoring)
• Sugar
• Monosodium glutamate
• Hydrolyzed yeast protein
• Grill flavor from vegetable oil
• Beef stock
• Yeast extract
• Beef fat
• Flavoring
• Oinion powder
• Beef
• Salt
• Dehydrated parsley
• Maltodextrin
• Dextrose
• Garlic powder
• Spice
• Partially hydrogenated soybean oil
• Natural flavoring
• Caramel color

After that you can have your kids/students look up words to find out what they mean, and you can talk about what and why food needs to undergo these processes. Sorry, no dirt here, except the insane variety of chemicals that went into this seemingly innocent can.