You’ve probably heard most of the jokes about fruitcakes. Like, they make great doorstops or gifts – for someone else.
The fruitcake is the hot potato of the holiday season: Nobody wants to be left holding one when the gift-giving frenzy ends.
So why does the fruitcake get such a bad rap?
It could be because it resembles regurgitated meatloaf. Or, it could be that the average storebought cake is so full of preservatives that odds are it will outlast you, your kids and your kids’ kids!
The next time you’re in a grocery or discount store, check out the contents of a fruitcake: strange-sounding ingredients like partially hydrogenated soybean oil, mono- and diglycerides, calcium propionate, propylene glycol, and mono- and diesters of fats can take the edge off even the heartiest of appetites.
And, like, what are “diesters (pronounced DIE-esters) of fats” anyway?
Dr. Paula Burke, a clinical nutritionist at the University of Illinois Medical Center, says the above ingredients are either food preservatives or chemically broken-down fat. Anyway you cut it, she says, it’s still fat.
Burke says that basically, the manufacturers have turned fat “into its chemical form. It’s hard to digest and not healthy. And for kids, the taste can be strange or unusual.”
Burke says there are a lot of preservatives in fruitcake because there’s a lot of fruit. “The fruit is coated with the stuff,” she says.
To be fair, there are plenty of sugary and supposedly low-fat foods that contain these ingredients. What do you think is in your average snack cake?
Still, there’s something about fruitcakes that turns people off. Maybe we’ll never know what that something is. Just remember, if you get a fruitcake this holiday season, don’t send it our way.
We have enough fruitcake problems of our own.
