What food slop products do you have difficulty giving up?
For me it's Coke, Flaming hot cheetohs, synders pretzel bites and anything... like... microwavable pizza esque. Like hot pockets, bagel bites, pizza rolls etc
Sugar, I basically have a damn sugar addiction. Wish I could stop, especially since I've not been keeping up on working out due to a fall last year and have gained a whole ton of weight. From fruit to boring grandparent candy if its sweet and put in front of me its fucking gone.
seems to be the trajectory of any taco bell menu item that is cheap and well liked. (though the last couple years of increases might be topping out in terms of what people's wallets can bear)
Other than my mom's cooking (which is great, but I'm moving out soon to sober living) yeah I eat nothing but processed slop. Should be eating apples and shit not
Spicy dill pickle flavored potato chips.
I don't even have a car which complicates things. I'm literally thinking of getting some right now. Most other highly processed slop I can take or leave, and frankly maybe this I could too, but just would be replaced by a different "cheap" easily accessible food
Energy drinks. I get them sugar free, but all that caffeine daily cannot be good for me. Friends have told me it completely perplexes them because I eat clean outside of them, I drink 3 liters of water a day, no red meat, no refined sugar, little fried food, almost no carbs and I'm basically straight edge, no alcohol, no other drugs. But caffeine via energy drinks. it's like my one little treat, but it's probably killing me faster than a moderate amount of grass fed beef or something.
Maybe I'm in denial, but depending on how many you drink it's probably fine?
One energy drink has around the same caffeine as a cup of coffee. One time I did drink so much knock-off redbull that my pee was fluorescent (It's never been that colour before or since), but other than that it's probably fine.
I do mostly do Monster, which has less than some of the more extreme brands like Bang. Maybe I am being a little too crunchy, but coffee feels "natural", but I hate the taste of it, whereas energy drinks are this very synthetic thing that I love.
I rediscovered my love for mac and cheese when I found out Walmart's generic version was 39 cents. It was seriously the cheapest calorie per dollar meal you could find so I was buying up cartfuls of that slop every trip during the pandemic when grocery prices for most other foods skyrocketed. It's gone up a bit since then but still a hell of a bargain compared to the Kraft box and it tastes pretty much the same.
What powder are you using BTW? The Hoosier Farm Big Daddy Mac Mix?
Coffee and chocolate. The coffee can be pretty easily sourced from not hyper-evil stuff, but even with cutting out Nestle it's still a coin flip. Hoping to cut out the chocolate, save for maybe a local vegan chocalatier.
As a former employee, I hope you were showing up for the cheap or free pizzas right before closing. We ripped the box tops off to signal to inventory that we threw it away, then gave it out or sold it for a couple bucks we pocketed. That was a looong time ago; they probably have better prevention systems now.
Like I said, I was a carnie. The only restaurants reliably open after we closed were y'all and McDonald's, and McD's was somehow always further from the lot than Little Caesars.
They were still doing this in my neck of the woods as late as like 2019, I only ran into it a few times accidentally but now I almost wish I'd just made a habit of it
I'm a latent/reformed hot couch homie and still fucking adore microwaved frozen burritos. Cooking them enough to unthaw in the microwave then basting them with a little melted butter and browning it for a couple minutes turning it in the oven on the broiler setting then serving them with some salsa and sour cream+chives and eating them like enchiladas with a fork and knife was a revelatory dirtbag gourmand discovery.
The only real vice I have is mayo and other condiments. Everything else is either relatively healthy or homemade and sparse. I still eat processed slop when I'm on the road but it just doesn't taste good anymore and I feel worse the next day.
I am guilty of enjoying many slop products, potato chips, sugary cereal, processed cheese slices, pizza pockets, the list goes on. My parents never really kept processed or instant food in the house growing up, and now as an adult I feel like it's sort of backfired with me eating all these things to compensate. Eating a grilled cheese made with shitty white bread and the fake cheese slices still feels like I'm staying at a friend's house and getting away with something I shouldn't. Or maybe that's just a bad excuse I've made up.
For me it's a short list of what I have been able to give up. I didn't know lunch meats were so bad for the longest time and was never nuts about them. Same with bagels. And switching to sugar-free sodas was a breeze because I don't even know if I could distinguish them in a blind taste-test.
For all the other garbage, I'm a garbage disposal.