You can go healthy or spin off into a saturated fat-laden, junk-food journey at the McGavin's Bread Basket at 770 Bay Street.
The Little Debbie snacks might not have much nutritional value but talk about dollar value.
On the healthy side, an even better value has marked-down bread at $1.19 per loaf or package of five for $4.95. Buy in bulk, and pop it into the freezer to halt the expiry-date countdown.
There are even high-end bread products such as 100 per cent whole-grain loaves with fibre, calcium, Omega 6 and an impressive-looking health-check logo. Depending on what's available, you can pick up buns, flat breads, cheese sticks and garlic bread for bulk bargains
There's also regular stock, for higher prices, that isn't nearing the end of its shelf life.
Those Little Debbie snacks beckon though, like the Zebra Cakes I fell for. They are soaked with 320 calories per double package, with five packages in a box. Those innocent looking cakes are loaded with, and I quote in descending order: Sugar, corn syrup, enriched wheat flour, water, modified palm and palm kernel oils, hydrogenated soybean and cotton seed oils, dextrose, soybean oil . . . salt, cocoa powder and chemicals with names I won't even get into.
I got 10 cakes for $2.59, with tax.. That's just over 6 cents per calorie from a company that has sold 157 billion snacks since 1960. If you lined them up, it would cover more than 9.9 million miles. Phil claims to have not taken even one solitary step on the Little Debbie journey, let alone a mile or two. He swears he hasn't even heard of them, but there's at least one Twinkie wrapper in everybody's closet somewhere.
My advice is to go light on the Devil Squares and Cosmic Brownies and concentrate on basic bread values.
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