Large food corporations are responsible for a lot of our eating. As much as I like to rhapsodize about "fresh" eggs, and lashings of cream, this isn't what's happening across the country. Therefore, I like trying out the new products these companies put out occasionally. Even among processed foods, people deserve a decent product.

With that in mind, I picked up Nestle's new "Sugar Free" Baby Ruth candy bar over the weekend. Obviously, the bar is a creature of the Atkins craze - a serious point against it. But how does it taste, and does it make sense to buy?

Well, first, even though FDA has required the label to say so, I just want to reiterate that there's nothing low calorie or low fat about the bar. A normal Baby Ruth, weighing in at roughly 60 grams, provides 280 calories and 12 grams of fat. The sheer numbers on the sugar free bar are indeed smaller (140 calories, 8 grams of fat), but that's because the bar itself is smaller - a mere 36.8 grams. One wonders if Nestle (and its consumers) wouldn't be better off just making their normal bar a little smaller, and leaving it at that. I should also note that you pay a lot more for the privilege of eating Nestle's sugar free offering - I noticed a premium of about 40 cents over the larger sugar-filled Baby Ruth, but it might differ elsewhere. I suspect the price difference isn't purely marketing - the artificial sweetener Nestle uses, sucralose (brand name Splenda) is much more expensive than even good sugar.

As for taste, it tastes exactly how you would imagine sugar free chocolate might taste, but with an unexpected (label warned) threat of laxative effect - flat, insipid, slightly sickly - with a few nuts strewn within. It certainly doesn't taste of chocolate. As people who read my writing realize, I can't imagine the mentality that drives people to eat this horrible thing regularly. Eat one square of real chocolate and give the rest away - buy an apple - drop a spare few blueberries into a pot of full fat yogurt - anything but this.

I sometimes wonder whether I'm being unfair to this kind of product. The bar tastes kind of sweet, after all, and there are some nuts in there, and the brown stuff covering the filling does kind of look like chocolate, even if it doesn't taste anything like it. And anyway, the chocolate of the normal Baby Ruth doesn't taste like chocolate either. Am I just sneering at something people want to eat? Well, yes, but I think my sneer is deserved. If even one person reads this and decides to put aside the sugar free Baby Ruth and do something else instead, I'll be glad. We don't all need to suddenly become yoeman farmers - but if we can put the person who invented this candy out of a job, then we'll have done something good anyway.