#414 Callender Boy

Recently I’ve been trying come up with quicker meals, that don’t require a lot of preparation but are also healthy. That’s hard to do. Healthy usually means relatively fresh, not too many additives, and with lean meat and vegetables. Unfortunately, most prepared entrees are loaded with the preservatives that increase the shelf life of all American packaged meals. Funny, since a lot of those entrees are frozen. You’d think the freezing part would do all the preserving you’d need. So recently, I was at the grocery store and I saw a sign for Marie Callender pot pies. I thought hey, I bet that’s healthy, and grabbed two or three. I mean, if you’re like me, you grew up with those little Swanson chicken pot pies. They were the great fallback meal for my mom when she had some evening engagement and she wanted to feed our brood quickly. They were cheap too, like a quarter a piece of something back then. Well the Marie pie looked a little bigger but what the hey, I’m bigger, so I forked over the three-and-a-half bucks a piece and headed home. A couple of nights later I pull one out and find that it has this neat high tech special microwave reflector inside the top of the box and you have to cook the pie inside the box. Techno-meals are cool. I throw the box away afterwards, make a quick salad, toast a bagel and eat the entire meal. I feel strangely full. Too full. The pie, it turns out, has less vegetables than the picture on the box, and contains a lot of fairly salty sauce. It reminded me of a trip to the beach. I don’t add salt to my food so prepackaged food always seems a little like getting rolled in a wave and accidentally gulping a mouthful of seawater. A few nights later, I have another one and I’m really full again so I decide to look at the nutritional information of the microwave-mutilated box. At first glance, it’s only a little worse than I expected. Turns out one serving of Marie Callender’s Chicken Parmesan Pie has 530 calories and includes 32 grams of total fat. 12 grams of that is saturated fat. Which by the way is 60% of my recommended daily allowance. Total fat is 49% of my daily allowance. The salt? 720 mg of sodium, a mere 30% of RDA. And in the classic American sweet-salt blend the pie also contains 43 grams of carbs, 14% of RDA. Well okay, I thought. It is my big meal of the day and it is dinner. I can splurge a little. That’s when I looked closer at the “per serving.” The serving size is one cup. The servings per container are two. Uh oh. Each pie is two servings. That means 98% of my fat for the day, 60% of my sodium, 28% of my carbs and a whopping 120% of my saturated fat. So much for that healthy feeling of home cooking. The line on the box should have given me a clue. It said Marie Callenders, Inspired by Grandma. Oh yeah, that was the grandma that died of obesity, high blood pressure, and hardening of the arteries…
America, ya gotta love it.