This Week in Overlooked Dinner Foods: Applesauce

Family dinner has become a dwindling phenomenon in the United States. Whether hectic schedules, changing preferences, television, or ‘life getting in the way’ are to blame, families are no longer taking an hour out of their evening to enjoy each other’s presence around good old fashioned home cookin’. It is no secret that American citizens highly value their families, but the dinner table has become a place to scatter mail, snacks, and trinkets rather than a place to gather and discuss the day’s events.

A hearty, satisfying dinner generally consists of some sort of meat, a vegetable, some pasta, a drink of choice, and a side dish. In my household, nothing brought meals together like a big bowl of applesauce. From as early as I can remember, my refrigerator was always stocked with two glass jars of Mott’s® Original Applesauce: a jar for eating out of, and a backup jar for when the current jar was scraped dry. Nothing beat joining the clean plate club, then washing it all down with a refreshing bowl of applesauce. I often wondered to myself: how does something that is full of Vitamin C and free of both cholesterol and sodium taste this good?

I bet you were unaware that when Natalie Babbitt quoth, “Like all magnificent things, it’s very simple,” in Tuck Everlasting, applesauce was among the things she was referring to. Much of the applesauce you eat consists of a handful of ingredients—apples, high fructose corn syrup, water, and ascorbic acid (better known as Vitamin C). Knowing what exactly is in the food you are eating has become the latest craze, and applesauce proudly serves as a delicious staple of any healthy diet without containing hard-to-pronounce chemicals.

Few foods besides applesauce can be lifelong pleasures. You can eat it all the way from infancy when you do not have any teeth and still enjoy it as ninety-year-old toothless wonder. Due to this longevity, a sense of nostalgia is invoked with every bowl. It is not often that comfort foods provide more benefits than they do detriments, but then again applesauce is an uncommonly wonderful treat. Do yourself a favor next time you shop at the grocery store, buy a couple jars of applesauce. I can say with complete confidence that you will not regret it.