Whether it’s a jar of pasta sauce from the supermarket or… … a lot of today’s ready-to-eat foods are engineered to keep people coming back for more.

There are some decent pasta sauces out there. I mostly use marinara as an ingredient in place of tinned tomatoes as the tinned ones are in cans lined with plastic (so plasticizers, primarily bisphenol-A) and the ones in glass are about four times the cost of decent marinara.

How do I find a decent marinara? When evaluating a new-to-me brand, I look at the ingredients. If sugar (in any of its many guises) is on there, the bottle goes back on the shelf. Ditto tomato paste.

What do I do with it? Well, sauce, chili, French onion soup (adds a nice kick of umami), curry (same reason). I’m sure I’ve forgotten some dishes I put it in.

Speaking of bisphenol — there are things in our food that are IMO considerably worse than ‘empty calories’. I’d suggest a Medium article posted by infinome: Did Petrochemicals Cause the Diabetes Epidemic?