Technology and Fruit Cups

So I ate a fruit cup for my afternoon snack several days ago. It was really good, and I thought I should post a follow-up to the fruit cup debacle I previously posted on Facebook.

Oh, did you miss that post on Facebook? Unfortunately, I can’t copy it and repost it here because I closed my Facebook account. For the basic user, including myself, anything I’ve posted is now gone. At least until I re-open my account, which at the moment I refuse to do. Dumb Facebook won’t even delete an account properly.

I’m ready to close my yahoo account as well. Apparently my account was hacked, and a spam message was sent to everyone in my address book using my email address. Only there is no record of the email in my sent folders. I wonder if that means the email was sent from somewhere else, but masked as my account. I’ve never been hacked before. So all I knew to do was to change my password. But I felt that it should be reported or something else done besides a password change. So I searched Yahoo’s help center and found nothing. Finally I decided all I could do was contact Yahoo help to report that my account had been hacked and that I had not actually been spamming my friends. Of course to contact yahoo, you have to fill out a form, and it makes you select a subject from a list. I picked “How/why was my account compromised?” even though my real question is “What do I do when my account is compromised in addition to changing my password?”   Luckily there was a box to explain the problem, another box to paste in full headers from an email, and third box to paste an email message. So I utilized all three of those, using a bounce-back message when the spam email couldn’t make it to one of my contacts. It actually didn’t take long to get a response back from Yahoo. But the response was useless. I was sent a form letter, generated based on the subject line I was forced to pick and it did not match my question. It started out, “Thank you for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care. We understand you have received a prompt to change your password when you log into your Yahoo! account.” Nope. I never received a prompt; I changed it on my own, thanks. The rest of the email was useless as well and never deviated from the form. In fact, the customer service tech didn’t even bother to put their name at the bottom, where a space is left in the form for that purpose. Heck, I may be giving yahoo more credit than they deserve. Maybe it wasn’t a form letter sent by a person, but instead an automated response sent by computer.  Yahoo followed up today by sending me a “Your opinion matters” email with a link to a survey. I wasn’t very nice, but I think they deserve it. Dumb Yahoo.

Dumb technology. Maybe that’s why I like camping these days. I like to be cut off from the rest of the world for a few days, at least on my terms. I’ll keep hot water and flush toilets nearby, thanks.  And the ability to retreat into my car during a bad thunderstorm. What can I say, I am a wuss.

Anyway, back to the fruit cup. So the last time we went to BJ’s for camping/hurricane/pregnancy snacks, I found fruit cups that were labeled “no added sugar” and “packed in water.” I’m not sure why I didn’t read the rest of the label. But I got home to find they also had ARTIFICIAL SWEETNER. I didn’t have time to go back to the store. So I took the whole box to work and put it in the food drive bin. I kind of feel bad, because I don’t think anyone should eat artificial sweeteners. But most people don’t care, so I suppose someone will appreciate my donation.

Well I was at BJ’s again looking for camping/pregnancy snacks again (hopefully no more hurricanes), and we went down the refrigerated isle. I spotted fruit cups labeled “fruit naturals.” I was careful this time. I even looked at the full ingredients list. Various fruits, fruit juice, some acids, and some preservatives. No sweeteners. And it must be kept refrigerated, so that means it is closer to natural, right? Yeah, yeah, I’m conveniently ignoring the “natural flavors” ingredient for now. It’s obvious that it isn’t really all natural. It looks like the same fruit cup we had when I was a kid, except packaged in plastic instead of a can. Do you remember those? The cherries are bright pink. But before I investigate this further, I taste it. It is actually a lot better than the ones we had as kids. Sure all the same fruits are represented, but overall, it tastes fresher. Maybe it’s the fruit juice instead of the syrup that it is packed in, or the lack of metal taste from the can. I really enjoyed my fruit cup.

Then I turned to the ingredient list. Carmine is listed as part of the cherries. Obviously that’s where the pink color comes from, but I wondered what it was. I ended up at Wikipedia.

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If you don’t already know what carmine is, and if you ever want to eat a fruit cup again, I suggest skipping this last part below the picture. 

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Wikipedia says carmine is “produced by some scale insects, such as the cochineal beetle and the Polish cochineal.” And, “to prepare carmine, the powdered scale insect bodies are boiled in ammonia or a sodium carbonate solution, the insoluble matter is removed by filtering, and alum is added to the clear salt solution of carminic acid to precipitate the red aluminium salt.” Oh, also, “it has been known to cause severe allergic reactions and anaphylactic shock in some people.”  

Yummy. Made from insects and ammonia. I should probably figure out where the nearest hospital to my work is located. Just for future reference.

For my own sake, I’m not looking up the rest of the ingredients that I don’t recognize. But I guess I’ll try to stick with whole fruit once I’m done with the fruit cups.