Wuest Ways and Bars
It is a hot Tuesday in August 2024. Our skydiving group, the Wuest Ways has made two jumps early, trying to make four before it gets too hot and the dust devils amplify the danger of landing. Because there is a military team training here at Perris today, we get to jump out of a Skyvan. It is a boxy looking twin engine plane with a large tailgate. That makes exiting as a group go faster, compared to a Twin Otter with a side door. As old fogies, we prefer it since it requires less speed and flexibility.
We have brought folding camp chairs and push up canopies to provide shade. Rex even brought a mist-maker he devised from a compressed air sprayer. Chubb brought a battery operated fan that John hung from the top of the canopy, until the wind blew it off the hook and it broke. Doug and Marilyn, Rick and Paula, Johnny B., Dillon, Bruce, Marty, Marie, Lynn, and Jim were there. Apologies to any I have left out. At our age, the memory starts to go.
We are all retired, except for Marty, who will retire within weeks. We discover we are all on Medicare and wonder in jest if our 16-way group would be a record.
We swap stories. For no good reason, I bring up my recent discovery of WellBean snack bars. They all have beans or other legumes, no salt, oil, or sugar, and only small numbers of whole food ingredients such as nuts, seeds, figs, and dates. Some flavors have cocoa; others do not.They come in six flavors. I like the three I have tried so far, though I admit they are not hyper-palatable as some of their competition. They are made from only whole plant foods, so I consider them real food. They are also very satisfying.
Chubb, who is very thin and among the toughest, most badass women I know, brings out her snack, which is a couple of flavors of Kind bars. She asks what I think of them. Here is the nutritional label of one, snagged from their web site:
At a glance, I note the palm kernel oil, three kinds of sugar, and added salt. Despite the marketing, to me this is not a healthy food. The marketing geniuses say “0g trans fat, 5g sugar or less, gluten free, good source of fiber, kosher, low glycemic index, low sodium, no genetically engineered ingredients.” Now, I’m not saying that eating one of these once in a while will kill you. I would not eat one unless I were very hungry indeed and nothing better were available. I would think of this as a candy bar.
For comparison, here is the label for a WellBean bar:
So, compared to the Kind brand, WellBean is a bigger, more satisfying serving with half the fat, and all the fat in it comes from whole foods, not processed palm oil. It has one-seventh the sodium of the “low sodium” Kind bar. It has six ingredients compared to fourteen (of which 3 are sugar and 2 are fat). WellBean bars cost about twice as much as Kind bars, because WellBean is a smaller outfit with much less economy of scale.
It tastes like sweet food, not like candy. It does not taste like beans.
We were geared up for our fourth jump when the dust devils appeared. It was about 100 degrees Fahrenheit at that point, and getting hotter. We called it off for the rest of the day, with the attitude that that is how one becomes an old skydiver. I went home instead of joining my friends in the Bombshelter bar. But I missed them.
