Derek Beres's Blog
Organic Junk is Organic Junk View 0 comments Posted on: Mar 18, 2009
78 views
Category: Food
A friend of mine, who works in the natural foods industry, recently remarked: If junk food is made with organic products, it’s still junk food.

As someone who pays close attention to his diet, and follows the food industry pretty faithfully, the rush towards “everything organic” has been disheartening. Five years ago the term “organic” had meaning when spotted on a shelf. Now, I have a hard time believing that organic potato chips are actually healthy, or that just because something is made with “natural ingredients,” that it’s supposed to be worth eating.

Case in point: Whole Foods, a company that prides itself on the natural ingredients citation, sells Valomilk, which is a glorified Ring Ding. To be fair, I checked the ingredients on their site, where they also wave the natural ingredients banner:

Our creamy flowing marshmallow center is made from fresh corn syrup, pure cane sugar, distilled water, pan dried (hand made) egg whites, pure Bourbon vanilla from Madagascar and a touch of salt. Nothing artificial. No additives. No preservatives .

I’m not particularly concerned with whether or not my corn syrup is fresh, I’m still going to avoid it. And the second ingredient in this candy concoction, cane sugar, is another diabetes-inducing tincture. Not that either of these ingredients are necessarily bad in small doses, nor do I believe that the owner of Valomilk is expecting you to eat nothing but his cakes for a month and shoot a documentary about it. But we have to make a distinction between “natural” and “healthy,” and right now too many companies are too busy blurring those lines.

Another company who blurs lines is Organic Food Bar, whose original line of products, while a bit heavy on the oils (probably from the almond butter), are quite delicious. A while back they introduced their “Raw Organic Food Bar,” cashing in on the raw food scene. I’m not a big raw foodie, although I have done raw food weeks, and from those who follow such a diet that I know, the raw lifestyle pretty much involves preparing all your own food from scratch. Not that bars cannot be worthwhile; Lara Bars and Raw Revolution, along with many local companies, make great products. But when you get a product called “Chocolately Chocolate Chip,” which features non-dairy dark chocolate chips with soy lecithin and evaporated cane juice (organic, of course), we’ve gone way left of field.

This trend is not helped by the media. Take for example this article posted on Yahoo! via Men’s Health: “America’s Healthiest Restaurants.” It is a survey on the “healthiest” fast-food chains in the country. Top five, in descending order: Chick-fil-A, Subway, Jamba Juice, Au Bon Pain, and Boston Market. (McDonald’s holds it down at #7 out of 66.) The hardest thing to believe about this article is that it’s serious. They surveyors based health on calories, with a bit of focus on trans fats and portion size. That’s it.

Only a culture so disconnected from its food source could relate health to calories, which are measures of heat energy. How many calories one ingests is not nearly as important as the source of those calories. There’s a world of difference between five hundred calories of grade D beef and five hundred of vegetables. When the marketing of food becomes more important than the quality of food—take Jell-O’s celebrity-driven initiative of introducing “strawberry acai” and “raspberry gogi” (I’m guessing they meant goji) flavors—we suffer. The very word “calorie” tells us this: our energy is derived from other sources of energy. What goes into the making (and too often processing, and over-processing) of our food will be taken in, digested, and put back out through us, in our attitudes, in our words, in our actions. I’ve got to stick with Michael Pollan on this one: eat fresh foods, mostly vegetables, and not too much. The manic drive towards health is part of the psychosis, possibly the unhealthiest of all. The simplest things are too often the hardest to understand.