Food With 9,000 Ingredients

I will admit that I am 'that guy'. You know the person... the one standing in the middle of the aisle at the grocery store for 10 minutes comparing the labels on five different brands of apple sauce before finally being able to settle on one. I am an avid label reader... obsessive even, if there is more then one brand of something that I need I have no choice, I am stuck in that aisle until the quandary of which to choose has been un-quandrarified.

Organic, not organic, low sodium, low fat, all natural, it's all well and good but usually my decision comes down to one factor, which label I can pronounce and understand everything on. If the ingredients in (insert food product here) are roughly the same as they would have been if I had made it myself at home then my guilt over being a bad Mennonite and not actually making it myself is eased. But even stronger then my Mennonite guilt (and us Mennonites have a fantastic amount of guilt... that's right Jews, you're not the only ones who know how to work it) is my fear of the unknown, and in this case the unknown is 18 letter words that I couldn't pronounce if my life depended on it. I like to fancy myself highly literate and if I don't know what these words mean I feel like it can safely be assumed that the vast majority of the American population doesn't either.

So where do all these ingredients come from? What do they mean? What the hell are they? These are questions that I do not have answers for, but I can tell you from the vast amounts of time I have spent taking up space in that grocery store aisle reading those labels that they are in EVERYTHING. And some things I feel like are more justifiable then others, any frozen dinner for example... you're full of bad things and that's old news. Sorry DiGiorno, I know you thought writing "made with real cheese" on the box would make people mistake you for health food but you aren't fooling anyone. And then there are other things that I feel like have no right to have crazy ingredients in, Juice for example. You are juice, juice is not even a product it's an ingredient in and of itself so if you say you are juice then you should contain one thing... and that is juice. You may also, in my humble opinion, also contain water and maybe an added vitamin or two but that is about it. When four out of the top five ingredients on your label (hint: you shouldn't have five ingredients on your label at all) are just different ways to say sugar then calling yourself juice makes you a big fat liar.

To clarify, I am not a crazy food person obsessed with healthy stuff and terrified of preservatives, I've had mac and cheese made with Velveeta for lunch almost every day for the past week and the number of Totinos pizzas that get consumed at my house can only be described as inappropriate... I just am confused by everything having a list of ingredients as long as my arm, I don't understand it, it weirds me out, and I feel like they're taking over the world... or at least the grocery store.