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Add a dash of love to your meal |
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Written by J.M. HIRSCH, asap
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Monday, 07 August 2006 |
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 The natural and organic foods industry needs a good slap upside the head.
Mind you, I’m about as eco-green-free-range, organic-fair-traded-all-natural, harvested-by-unoppressed -Guatamalan-women as it gets. I’ve even bought organic diapers for my son.
But the industry has gotten too cute for its own good. And as the son of a natural foods industry executive, I see lots of product samples. So I recently took a tour of my pantry to see just how bad it is.
Salad dressing, for example. Why can’t we call it what it is? Because apparently that’s just way too Hidden Valley. Cue the pretentiousness, please. One all-natural company recently launched something called a “salad refresher.”
My favorite is the tea beverage that, though quite tasty, lists “love” among the ingredients. And this is something I’ve noticed on other natural and organic products. Are we to conclude that Kraft adds a dash of hate to its Easy Mac?
Modifiers are a big thing in natural foods. One bottle of raspberry rice nectar (a sort of honey made from brown rice) had five -- vegan, gluten-free, non GMO, hypoallergenic and macrobiotic (think masochistic vegans).
A bottle of birch sap (no, I have no idea) ups the ante with “original.” Hard to argue with that.
 But the winner was a jar of coconut oil that identified itself as:
- vegan
- organic
- extra virgin
- cold-pressed
- unrefined
- kosher
- certified coconut oil (in case you worried about its certification)
Some would argue that all this verbiage is an attempt to compensate for otherwise lacking traits. The editor of this column would say taste is among them.
I disagree. But it’s a tough point to argue when a jar of soy mayo boasts it will “elevate any sandwich or salad to the status of sublime.” I’m thinking you won’t find that on Hellmann’s.
And there is a lot of elevating going on. One package of organic iced tea says its fair trade Oothu (again, no idea) “elevates the tea experience.” And don’t worry, the Oothu is produced on a biodynamic “communitea.”
But the winner is the jar of organic black sesame tahini that says it will “enrich your life” and urges you to “savor its rich, complex flavor with mild, nutty undertones and rhythms of sesame contrasted with a natural, raw ’smoked’ sensation.”
Rhythms?
And where the modifiers end, the lists begin. As in, lists of ingredients the product does NOT contain. One box of granola that had 15 ingredients, also listed 13 it didn’t. Of those, my favorites were fish and shellfish.
So does my editor have a point? I don’t think so. Despite the silliness of their labels, many of these products are quite good, not to mention good for you.
But we need to remember where these companies came from. Being a natural food in the 1970s and 1980s wasn’t easy. They were sold mostly by hippies in tiny closets of stores, and the marketing evolved to cater to that population.
Then the organic explosion hit, and suddenly the makers of tofu hot dogs and almond butter found their products in high demand. The marketing savvy of these companies has yet to catch up.
The industry is just caught in a time warp. Hence the slap upside the head. You can still brew your hypoallergenic, free-range tea. But abide by this one request: Please, please, leave out the love.
———
asap columnist J.M. Hirsch covers food, diet and nutrition for the AP. E-mail him at jhirschap.org.
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