My Food Revolution: Granola Bars

I think the most frustrating thing about my journey on this 'Food Revolution' is that things we thought were healthy for us actually are packed with chemicals and processed. It feels like there's evasive language at every turn and figuring out what we can actually eat is a battle in and of itself, let alone eating right.

When starting this journey towards better eating I went to the grocery store and headed towards my usual sections, reaching for boxes and turning them over to the back. Based on the few chapters I had read in Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, I had some basic tools to figure out what I needed. I headed to the produce section picking up organic lettuce, green onions, cucumber, summer squash, tomatoes, bananas, apples, and grapes. I felt good about that and tried to figure out what to eat for breakfast and lunch.

Grocery Granola Bars:
I turned over every single granola bar box at the grocery store looking for just one box without twenty to forty ingredients and void of soy bean oil (I'm anti soy bean oil because of Monsanto, if you remember. Most soy bean and canola crops are genetically modified and are sprayed with Round-Up as soon as they are planted, in fact the amount of pesticides is enough to make your skin crawl.) I could not find a single granola bar that was anywhere close to what I wanted. Frustrated I picked up a regular Nature Valley box and made a bargain with myself to find an alternative.

Homemade Granola Bars:
My friend Sarah from Chicks Who Give a Puck sent me a semi-complicated recipe for granola bars that looked better than what was offered at the grocery store but still used Canola Oil. For all that effort it still had something I wanted nowhere near my food. Deciding it was better than nothing I resolved to try the bars but before I could test them out my coworker told me about Lara Bar.

Lara Bar:
Lara Bar is named after their founder, Lara Merriken. The idea for Lara Bar came about while Lara was hiking the Colorado Rocky Mountains. What started as a small operation now carries over twenty different varieties of breakfast bars, most are dairy and soy free, completely vegan. These bars have anywhere from two to nine ingredients. That's it, they aren't packed with ingredients you can't pronounce or oils that are loaded with chemicals. The only ones that are not guaranteed to be soy and dairy free are the ones with chocolate. Even though the chocolate chips used in them are vegan they are made at a facility that makes regular chocolate chips so there may be some contamination.

What you should remember when you are in the grocery store is Michael Pollan's rule - stick to the perimeter of the grocery store and buy real food void of any stickers of health claims. Things that claim to be healthy often aren't real food but chemically laden scientist made food like substances. Which means be weary of most cereals, choose to instead make a fresh breakfast for yourself and your family or to grab a Lara Bar.