Calorie Free

I saw a funny snippet the other day on a website I go to for, well, funny stuff.  It was supposedly a tweet by Bill Murray that read  'It's 2013, why are there still calories in food?'.  Now, I have no idea if he really said this, but it's funny nonetheless. 

Apparently Bill has never of a company called Walden Farms.  They make calorie free 'food'.  I kid you not.  Their schtick is 'save 10,000 calories a month' - by swapping out to some of their products. I've know about their salad dressings for awhile as I order some of them for the store.  Nothing crazy here ... water, vinegar and some flavorings.  Not something I would want to ingest, but not something that confounds me like, oh I don't know, maybe their spreads.  I ran across their peanut spread at the store for the first time the other day which you can see in the pic. 

I'm a pretty smart guy, but when I saw this item I said to myself no calories huh, then WTF is in this stuff?  Probably like you, I was both curious and scared to read the ingredient list.  My curiosity won out, but I'm none the wiser for my effort.  Check it out below.


Sure enough, zero for the listed calories.  Well, you might notice the little * at the bottom with 'contains trace calories'  Right.  Whatever.  That's not even the problem here.  There has to be something giving this product some bulk, something to actually make it spreadable with a knife.  I'm guessing that bulk has to be the second ingredient listed, the vegetable fiber.  What kind of vegetable fiber?  Who friggin knows.  And who cares right ... no calories!  Wait, that's not what I meant. 

Vegetable fiber, hmmm.  Notice something else on the label that doesn't jive with this?  Right, that would be the big fat zero listed next to the fiber content of the food.  Vegetable fiber is the second ingredient listed and yet this is a fiber free food.  And calorie free too, in case you forgot
 
I don't know.  I'm not going to make a bigger deal of this than I already have.  I have no idea how this product has no calories or no fiber.  Seems to me if you put two tablespoons of this stuff into a bomb calorimeter and lit it up, you would get some kind of reading.  I'm sure it's just some label slight of hand stuff that they can technically get away with.  Regardless, you wouldn't catch me putting this stuff into my pie hole. 

The moral of the story?  Eat real food.  Goodness knows there are some hucksters out there trying to pull a fast one on poor, gullible people, but this paleo stuff isn't exactly rocket surgery.  A rocket surgeon, however, might be exactly what we need here to solve our little peanut spread puzzle.