The Food Show!

The Sysco food show was funny! It was in a huge hall with hundreds of booths with representatives of every kind of food company you can think of, all of whom had samples. We started in the cheese area and ate way too much cheese, so we had to ration our sampling for the rest of the time. We went to every booth, which took several hours, and at one point our Sysco rep Carlo caught up with us and said that he'd been observing our progress and we were doing a very good job. You can do a bad job at a food show? There were some really interesting displays, such as this extremely patriotic crown roast of lamb at one of the meat booths:



We asked the rep at the lamb booth to take this picture of us, and he seemed confused about whether we were joking or not. Especially when we pulled out two little flags to wave. Here we are in America! In front of a lot of meat!

Another exciting feature was the "Splenda Challenge" at the Splenda (sweetener) booth. There were two unlabeled containers of iced tea, one sweetened with sugar and one with Splenda, and you were supposed to guess which was which. Jill and I felt confident about our ability to identify the fake sugar, so we each tasted the two teas, and immediately agreed which one was the Splenda iced tea. We were right! The Splenda rep seemed mildly impressed (why not embarrassed?), but we didn't win any prizes or anything, which we had been hoping for.

One sad thing was that at least half the booths were serving seriously pre-made foods, like canned enchilada filling, macaroni and cheese that you squeeze out of a bag, fully decorated cakes, and worse. The samples at these places consisted of chafing dishes that held unidentifiable glop with skin on top. Like a cafeteria, except this is where cafeterias get that stuff. Even more depressing is the fact that a lot of restaurants get their complete menus frozen/canned/heat-in-the-bag. Next time you order a dessert at a restaurant, and it seems kind of dry and not really anything like it looked in the picture on the menu, you can be pretty sure they bought that cake completely decorated and just defrosted it to serve you, with maybe some Hershey's syrup squeezed on it. Or you can come by Generous Servings and have a pastry that's made from real ingredients, which sounds a lot more appetizing to me.