Coffee tastes like...coffee?

Part of this adventure is tracking down all the bad stuff in the foods I normally enjoy.

Take, for instance, coffee.

It's in the news this week, by the way, but that didn't prompt my examination of my favorite morning beverage. On a whim I picked up the non-dairy creamer I normally put in the coffee and, low and behold, non-dairy creamer is made out of corn syrup solids.

Corn syrup. Kissing cousin to surgar. I already use a sugar substitute thinking I was doing good, avoiding all that sugar and all this time it was sneaking in the back door through a heavily processed corn field.

So no more non-dairy creamer. And while I'm at it, I might as well give up the sugar substitute. I've become suspicious of any thing that's a substitute for anything else.

So no cream and no sugar, substitute or sneaky-type, leaves an interesting question: Do I like coffee enough to drink it black?

Yeah, I think I do.

Well made coffee is sweet and rich and down right tasty. Notice I said, "well made coffee". And, therein lies the challenge.

Here is where I learned how to make coffee. Watch learn from the one of the masters of true cooking.

My new found love for black coffee reminded me of the last time I truly gave up sugar. Food suddenly tastes, well, like food. How many flavors in our daily diets are disguised by our voluntary or involuntary addition of the white stuff or its sneaky cousin?

A lot if not all. I'm not touting some conspiracy theory when I say that your friend, Corporate American, shoves sugar into anything that's going to be consumed. It's just economics. Sugar is cheap and addictive and, therefore makes the perfect filler.

But then again, maybe we should just shut up and trust our good friend, Corporate America. Surely they wouldn't feed us anything that wasn't good for us.

Right?