do you read your food labels?

So here's what I've been wondering...I've been discussing my allergies with Amy and Adam, and they started reading their food labels. I can predict what's in certain foods by this point because I've read so many labels and it makes me wonder if what I'm going through has made any of you start reading food labels...

Has anyone seen how many products have yeast in it? or 'autolyzed yeast extract'--which I had to google at some point early in the process. It's a partially broken down yeast product, as far as I can tell. either way, no good for me. but have y'all noticed that almost every frozen food item has yeast in it? Even frozen vegetables (that's the one that drives me nuts)! I can't really think of any processed food that I can eat, which is good for my health but plays havoc with my purse, time, and ingenuity.

Have any of you noticed that pastries almost always have rice flour in them? I have yet to figure this one out, but it must have something to do with texture. Some pastry doughs don't, but I think I've only been able to find one brand.

MSG isn't something I'm allergic to and I'd say I'm too young to really understand the furor over MSG from when I was a kid, but I've always had the vague idea that it's not in food anymore. Maybe in Chinese food, but that's an ethnic thing and it's not in food made in America. That's definitely a wrong though, wherever I picked it up! MSG is in about half the food labels I read. I talked to my grandfather, who was a chemist, and he remembers when they were coming up with new recipes and adding MSG was sure to have that je ne sais quoi which made the recipes better.

In other news, this worked out okay for me when I was without power for about 24 hours here...I didn't think the storm was that bad, but that could also be because of where I'm living. Either way, I didn't have to worry about the food in my refrigerator. My freezer had some stuff in it that I had to eat yesterday because it defrosted, but the rest of it was salvageable. Same for my refrigerator, my milk went bad but that was it and it wasn't a big loss since it ended up only being a few ounces (though i have been cooking up a storm today so that some of the cheeses won't turn). The good thing about being a vegetarian is most fruits and vegetables can go unrefrigeratored and it's okay!

Although on the vegetarian front, I've been reading cookbooks and who knew there were so many different names for the different variations on vegetarians!

As a complete sidenote, I would like to comment that I know I'm terribly erratic about capitalization of first letters in sentences, but it stems from the fact that I type so fast that I often get the second letter so that's why I don't do it. It's more erratic here because I often go back or restart sentences, allowing for proper capitalization but sometimes not. It's my quirk, and that's why (and i'm sticking with it!).