Nobody’s Checking This For You
Last week I picked up a bag of plain frozen chicken breasts. Not nuggets, not anything breaded or seasoned or dressed up — just chicken breast. The kind of thing you buy without thinking twice, because what could possibly be in chicken breast other than, you know, chicken. Turns out: glucose. Injected straight into the meat. My daughter, who eats cleaner than almost anyone I know and treats sugar in fruit as her only exception, was genuinely rattled by it. Not because a few grams of sugar is going to hurt her. It won't. It's a rounding error, calorie-wise. What actually got to her was the bit underneath — that she'd trusted a label that said "chicken breast" to mean chicken breast, and it didn't quite. This isn't really about chicken It's about the quiet habit most of us have of outsourcing our own judgement. To the packaging. To the shop. To whoever designed that label to look clean and simple and trustworthy at a glance. We assume someone els...