The Glory of the Fluffernutter

Wait, what? this is Rusty Blazenhoff territory.

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I came here to say that. :smiley:
(I’m even in the Fluff history book!)

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Damn, woman!
I am not worthy…
:heart:

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Ah, yes! Didn’t have them often, but I remember loving to pick apart Scooter Pies. It was neat seeing the quilted-surface cookie underneat the chocolate and white goo.

I’m 34 and had a hyperactive friend who from 2nd to 6th grade in the 90s ate one of these for lunch everyday. For a while, I thought it was his own demented invention, and I don’t think I learned it was a more universal thing until the internet came about (in our neck of the woods) a few years later.

The same kid also would make a big production of holding his nose and moving to another table any day I was packed a tuna salad sandwich. Clearly he was so accustomed to sythetic pseudo-foods that anything with any flavor, texture, or aroma was anathema to him.

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Marshmallow Fluff isn’t synthetic. It’s literally just sugar and egg whites. It’s basically a kind of meringue.

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Good 'ole “crap” sandwiches, as my mother called them. Loved them!

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HFCS is synthesized from corn starch. We can argue the semantics of synthesis, but the fructose is made industrially from starch.

If we’re being honest I never really liked pb & j and I’ve never had a fluffernutter. If we’re being brutally honest though it’s probably because I try to avoid things high in sugar and I’d imagine the sugar content in that is super high.

Journal of Nutrition says it’s a cost effective version of sugar. This argues it’s much like malted milk compared to regular milk.

Not one bit of innuendo or off-color joke?

:disappointed:

Maybe I’ll just appease the pedant and make everyone happy by replacing “synthetic” with “processed to the point of being unrecognizable as food”…

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I will appease the food snob by accepting your appeasement.

Your bar is pretty low for food snobbery if “looks askance at feeding a kid marshmallow fluff literally every day for lunch” == “food snob.”

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They’re close, but there’s an indication of some endocrine-system level differences that we still don’t fully understand. Normally when you consume sucrose, your body releases an enzyme called sucrase, which breaks it into the constituent sugars; this doesn’t have to happen with HFCS. [Some endocrinology happens], and the end result is different metabolic effects for consuming equivalent amounts of sugar and HFCS. The extent and significance of those effects remains to be better understood, but one effect is more systemic fructose exposure for HFCS, which has known health effects.

Research article.

(Disclaimer: I’m not a nutritionist or endocrinologist.)

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it is sugar, made industrially from starch. It is not made by plants, but in plants.

What’s the problem with that? What you’ve done is sorta changed the subject for some reason? It’s sugar, synthesized from starch, by way of an enzyme, to yield a final product highly enriched in fructose beyond anything found naturally.

By the logic that HFCS is sugar, then apples and tomatoes are interchangable fruit. Surele apple sauce on your pasta sounds delicious!!

Also, malted milk has an enzymatic (here is the similarity) action which converts maltose to glucose- one sugar to another. HFCS has had an enzyme (here is the difference) act on it which converts a STARCH to a SUGAR. If those two strike you as interchangeable, that’s fine, for you. But chemists AND, more importantly, the human liver can still tell the difference.

Hardly going to cause a problem if it’s just something we encounter as a small fraction of our diet.

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Just call it synthetic! :slight_smile:

Because it is. Chemistry. Not Biology.

The only people I’ve ever heard go on about how sugary it are King Corn.

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No, but my maternal grandfather liked peanut butter and banana sandwiches.

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That artwork is just screaming for some blood.

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