OK, today my pet peeve is high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). I always buy non-HFCS containing whole grain bread for myself and my husband, and I refuse to buy the commercially available HFCS containing breads. Even the whole grain varieties of these breads have HFCS as one of the first ingredients! I usually buy bread at Trader Joe’s or Fairway, but yesterday I wasn’t able to get to one of these stores and I really needed bread. So I went to the A&P down the block. I had looked for non-HFCS containing breads before and hadn’t found any. I searched the whole aisle again, and found not a single one. I have no doubt that for many years, HFCS has provided a cheap filler that allowed big companies to make much more bread with the same amount of grain, and charge the same as if the breads did not contain HFCS. I imagine that even with today’s commodity prices, this economic advantage for the companies still holds. The price of corn has skyrocketed, but the price of wheat has also, so I guess it evens out. Apparently, HFCS gets a bad rap in the media, in that it is generally popular to blame the ubiquity of HFCS for the obesity epidemic in the US. In a New York Times article from 2006, several expert scientists clarified the issue, saying that there is no hard scientific evidence linking HFCS consumption and obesity, and that it is no worse than refined white sugar. So how good is refined white sugar for you? The simple question is, then, that there are delicious breads that do not contain HFCS, so why put it in?