Muesli bar with nutrition facts in magnifying glass

Wendyl has always been a huge advocate for eating real food, like it used to be in Nana’s day, not the mass-produced, highly processed and chemical laden stuff that passes for food in supermarkets today.

This article is from her book Supermarket Companion; how to bring home good food. It is an entertaining story about what we used to eat by way of snack foods and how that has markedly changed over time with a plethora of packaged foods laden with additives.

At the end of the article there are reviews of several products and links to recipes for healthier alternatives.

What’s really in those commercially made snacks?

When I was growing up, my family always had a break for morning tea or coffee. It sounds like such an old-fashioned thing to do, but in the weekends at about 11am my mother would call out, “Coffee in the lounge!” and my father, brother and I would join her and there would be instant coffee in hand-made pottery mugs, complete with not quite matching but equally as hand-made milk jug and sugar bowl and a pottery platter with some crackers and cheese, or biscuits or cake to go with the coffee.

Sometimes we’d have visitors over for “Coffee in the lounge!” but mostly it was just the four of us, sipping caffeine and munching on biscuits.

At the time it seemed like a perfectly normal thing to do and I have fond memories of sitting and talking as a family, feeling very grown up because I was allowed to drink coffee and eating nice things with it. My family is incredibly good at doing this.

My parents love nothing better than a room full of people drinking either wine or coffee and having a good old natter. Sometimes it can get a little heated, but there’s always been a keen appreciation for people’s views and an encouragement for people to express them.

It was probably those weekend “Coffee in the lounge!” sessions that helped me become a person who has an opinion on everything and isn’t afraid to express it.

And it would be fair to say that, as my brother and I grew up, the main topic of conversation in my family was food. My brother trained as a chef, I eventually learned how to cook, both my parents have always been good cooks and we have always enjoyed sitting down and sharing our latest food findings.

To me those coffee sessions now seem like a completely out-dated ritual which has more in common with Downton Abbey than an ordinary middle-class Kiwi family in the 1970s and 1980s. There is a theory that morning and afternoon tea were invented by the upper classes in England to give themselves something to do every few hours as they idled their days away. In England, “Coffee in the lounge!” would be called “Elevenses!”

In New Zealand, morning and afternoon tea breaks became a hard-won battle for labourers and farm workers who needed the sustenance provided by a “smoko”.

Today, in their late seventies Mum and Dad still have “Coffee in the lounge!” and it’s something I enjoy sharing with them from time to time.

In my house there is no such thing. At 11am Paul and I are usually in our separate offices in our old villa, tapping out various stories to meet a range of deadlines, having got Pearl off to school, walked the dog together, cleaned up the kitchen, hung the washing out, answered our e-mails and finally been able to start work.

We also rarely eat anything between meals, so the cakes, biscuits and crackers which are integral to a break for morning tea or coffee are non-existent.

Recently, I was glancing through my mother’s old cooking book, where she kept all her favourite recipes. Leaping out at me were Broken Biscuit Recipes (Uncooked), which were a regular feature of “Coffee in the lounge!”, as they were easy to make along with Hokey Pokey Biscuits, Chocolate Crunch (which I made a lot), Lemon Fudge Fingers and Fudge Cake. Some of them were written into the book by me with my childlike script, using a fountain pen and I also found an elaborate recipe for a coconut cake in the shape of a rabbit. I remember making this for a cake competition in Form One at Northcote Intermediate School and was so pleased with it that I was sure I’d win. But I came second to a very boring lemon cake, and my mother later told me that it was because she was a teacher at the school and her daughter couldn’t be seen to win the prize. I’m not sure that was true but it made me feel a little better, sort of.

If no one had been baking, then it was crackers and cheese, a favourite standby for morning tea in most homes.

Once, as a young journalist, I went to interview a family in the poorest of homes in South Auckland . The family served me morning tea with crackers and cheese and I remember thinking how kind and generous it was of them to go to so much trouble for a lowly Auckland Star reporter.

Before the 1960s recipes for cakes, sponges, biscuits, loaves and scones abounded in New Zealand kitchens. According to the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, almost a third of Aunty Daisy’s 1954 cookbook was devoted to “tin-fillers”. It was divided into sections for particular types of baking: biscuits, large cakes (including eight types of sponge), small cakes, and “bread, scones, teacakes etc”.

But then came the advent of the supermarket, with the first Foodtown opening in Otahuhu, Auckland in June 1958. For the first time people could buy a big range of commercially prepared baking goods at the supermarket rather than the limited offerings available at the local bakery. It led to a decline in home baking and was eagerly accepted by women who, like my mother, were beginning to join the workforce.

On the day I started school in July, 1967, my mother took herself off to teacher’s training college to become a teacher. In my neighbourhood it was very unusual for the mother to go to work, and I know it was tough for Mum to stand up to those women who believed a woman’s place was in the home.

Consequently my mother was a very early adopter of supermarkets and the convenience they supplied for her busy life. I would head off to school with a lunch box full of food which came in packets, while my best friend came to school with a lunchbox full of home-baked goods.

She thought my lunch was incredibly cool, and I thought her lunch looked incredibly delicious, so most days we swapped.

One of the mainstays of the supermarket baked goods has always been the Raspberry Jam Slice. I can remember it gracing our coffee mornings as a kid, and I know that occasionally I have picked it up myself to take to a children’s birthday party or perhaps to serve friends for morning tea. We don’t always have time to bake and these products are just one step better than pulling out a pack of biscuits. But then I picked it up one day to review it for my column.

We won’t be eating Raspberry Jam Slice from the supermarket again.

I first noticed the long list of ingredients with scary words like “solvent” and “egg replacer” in them on the back of the pack.

Raspberry Jam Slice is an old-fashioned offering, yet this modern version had a massive 45 ingredients in it. In my ancient Aunt Daisy cookbook I found a recipe for a Raspberry Jam Shortcake, which is the same thing, that used just eight ingredients. So that’s 37 ingredients added to this cake, mainly to give it colour and preserve it. The best-before date was a month after the date I bought it, which was also a bit of a worry.

What I also found was something I had never seen before, and haven’t since, in a food product. A solvent called propylene glycol, which in large doses in animals can cause central nervous system depression and slight kidney changes. It’s classified as a solvent, is also used in anti-freese and is an anti-foaming agent. I struggled to imagine my Nana measuring bits of this into her Raspberry Jam Slice.

Then there were the four artificial colours – tartrazine, carmoisine, amaranth and ponceau 4R – which have all been banned in other countries.

Yet this is a very popular item in the baking aisle at my local supermarket. When I visited the store while I was writing this chapter I noticed about 20 packets of Raspberry Jam Slice occupied two shelves of the baking aisle alone.

IF YOU’RE NOT buying from the baking aisle, like most parents, you might be spending time in the muesli bar aisle, wondering which of the 122 varieties on offer are the best choice for your kids.

On the surface, muesli bars – full of oats and nuts – seems like a great, nutritious snack to pop in school lunches. But, hidden in those little bars can be lots of sugar and fat, emulsifiers , preservatives, flavours and colours, so you have to be careful.

And it appears some people just think “muesli” and attach the thought “healthy” and then eat heaps, believing that they are ultimate health food.

But they really are just another form of cake or biscuit.

In 2006 Choice magazine in Australia found that children would be better off sitting down to a big fry-up for breakfast rather than some of the commercially produced muesli bars, which were loaded with fats and sugars.

The magazine analysed more than 150 different cereal bars and found that seven had more kilojoules than a Mars Bar and that two varieties had more saturated fat than a breakfast of two bacon rashers, two fried eggs and fried tomatoes.

Of all the bars tested, only 13 meet all the analysts’ healthy nutritional requirements, based on kilojoules, sugar, saturated fat, dietary fibre and wholegrain content.

A good guide when choosing a muesli bar is to look for one which has less than 2g saturated fat, less than 10g sugar, more than 1.5g fibre and less than 600kJ per bar.

I went on a mission to find such a bar and was happy to find a Nice and Natural Nut Bar which not only met these criteria but also only took 10, all natural ingredients, to make them.

See my analysis below for some healthy and not so healthy cakes, bars and biscuits.

Nutrionists will advise you to keep cakes, biscuits and bars to a minimum and regard them as a treat food, something you don’t have every day and certainly not as a snack.

Instead they advise you to make healthy snacks for yourself and your children, such as yoghurt topped with fresh fruit, fruit or celery with peanut butter, humus and corn chips, nuts and dried fruit.

Seedy Choc Chip Muesli Bar
Homemade Seedy Chocolate Chip Muesli Bar

MY FINDINGS:

CAKES AND BISCUITS

Oki Doki Disco Bars

  • Despite its disco fever packaging, no artificial colours to worry about.
  • Uses cocoa butter, which indicates good quality chocolate.
  • Very high in sugar.

One Square Meal

  • A feat of food science, providing exactly 33 per cent of all your nutritional and energy needs for one day.
  • Some clarity needed with the labelling.
  • Great for busy people, but not something you’d want to eat three times a day.

Raspberry Jam Slice

  • Contains four artificial colours which have been banned in other countries.
  • Takes 45 ingredients to make something which, if baked at home, would take eight.
  • Has a very long “best before” date which is scary for a baked product.

Collisions Mint Treats

  • No artificial flavours, colours or preservatives.
  • Nearly half the biscuit is made up of sugar.
  • Uses natural flavour.

Le Snak Cheese

  • It takes seven ingredients to process the cheese to ensure it lasts four months on the shelf without refrigeration .
  • You can save on additives and cash by substituting real cheese with bought crackers.
  • Each serve contains about 1 teaspoon of fat.

Milkies Choc Vanilla

  • Has an astounding 31 ingredients for a bar the size of a finger.
  • Has two “faux fibre” ingredients (inulin and polydextrose) which are not the same as the fibre you find in fruit, veges and grains.
  • You pay a high processed food price for the low fat and sugar content.

Krispies

  • It takes eight ingredients to make these biscuits, which is similar to the number required if you made them yourself.
  • One serving will provide you with about 85 calories.
  • A true Kiwi biscuit, produced here since the 1950s.

Ryvita Fruit and Seed Crunch with Honey

  • These are so good for you they should be available free on prescription from your doctor.
  • Completely free of artificial additives with only eight ingredients.
  • Very high in fibre from wholegrains, seeds and fruit.

Nice & Natural Nut Bar Original

  • One of the few products not to hide ingredients behind the food label codes. What you read is what you get.
  • Contains high oleic peanuts which have more heart healthy oleic fatty acid in them at higher levels than olive oil.
  • Only 10 ingredients and all natural as far as I can tell.

Arnott’s Iced Animals

  • Half a teaspoon of sugar in each tiny biscuit.
  • Three artificial colours which are banned in other countries.
  • Artificial flavours.

Arnott’s Tiny Teddy Chocolate Biscuits

  • Reformulated to have fewer kilojoules and less saturated fat and more fibre.
  • No artificial preservatives, but still has artificial flavours and colour.
  • Australian school canteen guidelines say they are okay once a day.

Recipes

Natalie’s Seedy Chocolate Chip Muesli Bars

Anita’s Oaty Banana Slice

Wendyl’s Amazing Amazeballs

Triona’s No Bake Cranberry Slice

Triona’s Lemon Lavender Cake