Chemistry for Dinner

One of my favorite summer recipes is Spinach Quesadillas from Vegetarian Suppers by Deborah Madison. This is a quick dish and as long as you don't use too much cheese and sour cream, a pretty healthy one. With the fresh salsa and corn from the Sunday Farmer's Market in Baltimore, the meal is something we look forward to every time it appears in the weekly menu plan.

When it was almost time to prepare dinner last night, I suddenly realized we didn't have any tortillas so I made a quick trip to the local Giant and given the array of tortilla choices presented to me, I started turning over the packages and looking at ingredients. I was about to buy a chemistry concoction with which to cushion my fresh farm spinach, onion, jalapeno pepper and cilantro. What has happened to our food?

A rhetorical question, of course, as I know what happened to our food and it makes me angry. I was angry last night and I'm still pretty angry about it this morning. Why is it impossible to go to the local grocery store and buy something without subjecting my body to this list of garbage:

Flour tortillas require a very short and simple list of ingredients: Flour, fat (some type of oil), water (or milk), baking powder and salt. I didn't make the tortillas last night - I bought this package and stewed about it all night. Yes, dinner was tasty but I can't help but wonder about the global impact of this kind of systematic and prolific poisoning that happens every day. I wanted to cook a healthful dinner. I wanted to do some thing simple and fast for a Monday evening. I wanted to enjoy the bounty from the weekend farmer's market while it was still fresh and bursting with flavor.

Why is it so darn difficult, if not impossible, to avoid ingesting chemistry for dinner?