but...but....but.....this is LA

I was out of town for a couple of days....Rancho Santa Fe...go if you haven't. Old world beauty and verdant land...fresh air.

Anyway..I digress. The point is I am back in town and I came back with THE HUNGER. The, "oh my god, I have to eat right now or I will chew through my own fist" kind of hunger. So..I go, innocently enough, to Chin Chin's in Brentwood. I start out the conversation with my server in my usual way.

Me: "I am highly allergic to sugar. What can I have?"

Server: "Nothing. Every single sauce has sugar"

Me: " Every SINGLE sauce?!"

Server: (with great distain) "Yes...it is a chinese restaurant"

It turns out I can eat nothing at Chin Chin's. I also do not eat garlic and without exception every sauce has both sugar and garlic in it. The chefs are (according to said server) completely incapable of making me a sauce that does not contain those two ingredients, which they must seriously believe to be the secret of their success.

Starving and not a little upset, I cross the street to Whole Foods. Keep in mind that when I once accidentally strayed into a K-Mart on a sale day..also a Sunday....I spent an hour in the Fairfax Whole Foods walking up and down the aisles at a museum pace to heal myself from the frenzy I had just left...

Whoops..sorry...another digression.

I enter Whole Foods. I can not eat the tuna salad, chicken salad, potato salad or cole slaw. I can not eat the Nori wrapped Halibut or ANY of the sushi. I can not eat the Teriyaki chicken breasts or salmon. Likewise the pot roast or the sliced roast turkey. Hot dogs...sugar, chicken dogs...sugar. Shall I go on....Pasta dishes, cold and hot salads, luncheon stuffings...SUGAR, SUGAR, SUGAR. Don't get me started on the breads or the frozen foods. Let's not even go into the areas of potato chips and crunchy snacks. More than half, MORE THAN half of the potato chip items had sugar. Salad dressings...sugar. Pasta sauces..sugar again.

If I listed all the items that had sugar this article would have enough entries to cover the whole front page of the New York Times. In case you are looking at some food item and are thinking of arguing with me. Let me give you the list. Sugar is no longer called sugar. The food brokers out there are smart and this is LA. Now sugar is called:

Sugar, sucrose, fructose, cane juice and her sister..organic cane juice, maple crystals, honey, corn syrup. On the healthier side, but still sugar we have: fruit juice, barley malt, brown rice syrup, manitol, sorbitol, stevia and the always popular...naturally sweetened. SUGAR SUGAR SUGAR.


And in the same breathe we worry that we are raising a nation of obese children.

Go into your restaurants..ask if your tempura batter has sugar (it does). Since you can't have that, how about some sushi. No luck...sushi rice has sugar. Ask if your pasta sauce has sugar. Ask about your salad dressings. Go to the deli section of your supermarket. See what you can get if you have no sugar at all. I got naked tuna and some salad fixings. It fed my hunger but not my soul.

I expected more from this town.

Rachelle