While shopping for groceries recently I came across Weetabix in the cereal aisle. It was a bit more expensive than the cereals I normally buy, but burst of nostalgia encouraged me to pick it up. My brain was telling me things like "This will go great with the bananas at home, and the box says it has four simple ingredients, look!"
I started wondering what the four ingredients were. Whole wheat was fairly obvious, and I figured there would be a binding agent of some sort as well as a sweetener. I turned the box over to have a look at the ingredients list and found this;
That's right. Not four but seven simple ingredients. Obviously this can mean only one of 2 things. Option one is that the people working at this company are stupid and do not know that there is a difference between four and seven. A company like this should not be trusted with the task of safely producing food for human consumption. Option two is that the people at Weetabix think that their consumers are too stupid to know that there is a difference between four and seven. A company like that does not deserve my money.
I put it back on the shelf and finished my grocery run. On the drive home I kept thinking about Weetabix. Do the Weetabix boxes in Scotland say the same thing? Do they use the same recipe for the Canadian market? I turned to the internet to look for some answers.
The Canadian product uses dehydrated cane syrup as the sweetener while the British simply list sugar but also add riboflavin (vitamin B2) and folic acid. The organic versions do not contain any added vitamins or iron, though interestingly the organic version in the UK has more than double the sodium.
Perhaps one day the back of the box will be replaced with something less condescending. I hope so, because I have a bit of a craving for Weetabix and blueberries.
