The Nutritional Institute

When last did you pick up a tub of ice cream and read the ingredients list? If you haven’t or can’t remember, here is the list of ingredients on a well know South African brand. It is ‘creamy vanilla’ flavour, full fat, so the list would be longer for a more complicated flavour: water, reconstituted skimmed milk powder (in full fat ice cream?), butter milk powder (what is that?), modified whey powder (what’s wrong with regular whey powder?), glucose syrup, cane sugar (do we really need both?), vegetable fat, maltodextrin, emulsifiers – E477, E471 (semi synthetic emulsifiers), stabilisers – E412, E410, E407 (thickening agents), flavourings, colourant: paprika – but vanilla ice cream is a creamy white, not orange?

Ever since we had our first child, I thought of ice cream somehow. Perhaps it transported me back to my own childhood, as I haven’t eaten it much as an adult. I went out on a hunt to see if I could find some ‘clean’ ice cream that I could feed to my sons one day. Tearing though a myriad of tub labels from a variety of supermarkets and small deli’s, I couldn’t find anything that was ‘clean’ or safe for my family to consume.

All I was looking for was real ice cream with a list of ingredients that I understood and that seemed familiar. How difficult could that be? After having read through the ingredients of the most basic flavour, vanilla, I couldn’t get less than 15 ingredients of which I could not find the word cream or vanilla???

The above ingredient list was so processed, so modified, and so very far away from the real product, that it made my heart sink! I mean, who uses orange paprika to colour a white vanilla ice cream? To me, this screams that the product is so far removed from its natural form due to over-processing, that the manufacturers have to over-modify it so much that the ice cream no longer contains the cream that the name suggests… Synthetic emulsifiers, flavourants, colourants and the entire process remove the ice cream from its natural form, that they have had to add the one recognisable ingredient, paprika to attempt to bring it back down to earth for semi-edible consumption? Soul destroying!

My mission was set. Off I went to purchase a home ice cream maker, found a soulful recipe from a wholesome author and did the test. Here is the list from the largest ingredients first: CREAM! Yes real raw cream from Pasteur reared cows – these guys do exist! Egg yolks from happy chickens that forage on worms and all the goodies they love to eat. Rich, raw, real honey that is so flavoursome it sends you to the moon and back, and a vanilla pod. That’s a whopping list of four honest and real food ingredients. No processed, modified or fake flavoured ingredients. No big words you can’t pronounce, let alone try to understand what they are. No frills. This is the most glorious ice cream I have ever tasted! Beautifully creamy and naturally sweet and it’s actually healthy and nourishing. I can’t say the same for the manufactured stuff. I think it may be the time for me to bring in an industrial ice cream maker to nourish other families out there who actually care about reading labels and what treats they serve. You have to ask yourself if the manufacturers of commercial brands actually care about health…?