The Ying and Yang of some packaged meals.

One evening just prior to dinner time, I came across a small package of Banquet’s Spaghetti and Meatballs while searching in the freezer. I nuked this in the microwave and have to admit it tasted pretty darn good. As I was eating, though, I happened to glance at the box that this meal came in and was a little shocked to find the salt level at 650 milligrams! (That’s about half the salt I have been allowing myself on a given day as part of a low sodium diet). It did explain, to some extent,  why this meal tasted so good. Salt is to the human body what heroine is to a junky! We are programmed from the get go to crave salt on a visceral level! Salt is so important to our bodies that it is one of the four stimuli our taste buds respond favorably to. (The other three being sweet, sour, and bitter). Cooks have known for hundreds of years that you can take almost any kind of bland food, add a little salt and it tastes great. That’s one of the reason’s companies like Banquet of ConAgra Foods like to add so much to their products!

To add environmental insult to the sodium injury, I’m also stuck with throwing out a cardboard box, plastic film and tray. Their combined weight at 52 grams is one quarter of the weight of the food (255 grams) they contain and their final destination is the land fill. Somethings just not right here.

Next, my curiosity now aroused, I took it upon my self to read the list of ingredients (click on image above). As you can see, the list is rather impressive as it contains a lot of what I have to assume are preservatives. There’s even some fish byproducts in there somewhere. That was a surprise! I got to wondering what the list would look like if I prepared the same thing myself. And so, that is exactly what I did!

Here are the ingredients I used to duplicate this recipe:

50 grams meatballs (4 small)

112 grams of spaghetti pasta

47 grams spaghetti sauce with mushroom bits

1 dash fake salt (potassium chloride)

1 dash black pepper

The homemade spaghetti sauce contained 1.9 mg of sodium per gram for a total of 95 milligrams. The meatballs contained about 45 mg for a total of 140 mg. That plus the fact that I used fake salt really held the sodium to more saner levels. The important thing is that I was able to avoid many the preservatives while saving some money to boot.

My next effort will be to make up a batch of this and then place serving portions into vacuum bags for use later on. That will be a separate blog.Now if I could just figure out a use for that plastic tray!