A Health and Beauty Aisle Fantasia

Sunday: for many people, a day of rest and reflection. For me, these concepts are not always the most congenial bedfellows. What to do with Sunday... as I lather my hands with a generous blob of "A La Maison" Rosemary Mint hand soap, it's clear to me I should go purchase more soap. I've got plenty, but a little stroll through Foods For Living's Health and Beauty Aisle couldn't hurt...

I love soap as much as music, and that's OK, but there was a time when I thought it wasn't. Nowadays, you'll often find me in FFL's Health and Beauty Aisle, inhaling lemongrass and lavender oil, masquerading as a well-adjusted person. I'm at peace with it. Let me explain.

Even in this digital age, I love looking at CDs (especially at local antiquated media stores like FBC). There is something fundamentally appealing about the way the titled spines fill the boxes in perfect uniformity while the print upon them is a wild spectrum of color and purpose. Unknown metal bands with their names in runic fonts somehow both austere and hokey. The more obscure the band, the wilder the proclamation, right down to the local acts with unutterable blasphemies screaming across their jewel cases.

            One part of the satisfaction I get from this perusal is the predictable pleasure of cultural tourism, sifting through this torrent of sound, both familiar and alien, with my fingertips. When it comes to shaving off the hours, to finding something a tune to whistle at the bus stop until that final number 13 comes droning out of the fog for me, CD browsing is fantastic. If asked why I enjoy it, I would reply—unreflectively—that I like music as both a sensual experience and as a cultural artifact, and so I like looking at it, picking it up, turning it over in my hands. I would say this while holding a hopefully unreflective jewel case in my hands, maybe (already) squinting at the fine print to see if someone interesting maybe played the panflute on Track 8.

A Socratically persistent person may ask if I were any more or less happy combing through the daunting array of available shampoos and essential oils in the Health and Beauty Aisle of Foods For Living. Of course, it would make me seem like a buffoon (or at least unemployed) to straight-up admit that I could easily be lost for the better part of an hour in the forest of handmade bar soap there, that I could be transported to regions antipodal to everyday experience, if only for a second, by smells lacking any natural analogue.

This hypothetical prosecutor of my secret self may note how nothing about my love of secondhand music perusal involves actually listening to the music.

For a long time I thought I had a pathological need to browse, with bouts of accompanying retail therapy. If something as respected and abstract as music could just as easily be replaced by a tray full of food-grade, local, organic essential oils (wink), was I not merely a simpleton with a need to cruise the shelves? Maybe. But I no longer think of it that way.

I love the shampoo shelf more than I could ever love a particular bottle of the stuff. And as much as I may love a particular album, it is ultimately not the Known—the treasured and Already Owned—that drives my compulsion to consume. The urge to stop and smell the rose-scented lotion surfaces anytime I am not engaged with something more pressing. The context changes, but the urge does not.

The immensity of life cannot be approached in any given moment. We dare not. The Bilderbergers, Higgs boson, Osiris, quanta, 14 billion eyes, the thousand lives one will never lead, who, thanks to fiction, you can still dive half inside and come out of face first and more terrified, the mortal reality of the life you dove into fiction to escape in the first place, refocused and more immediate than ever…but the shampoo gives one little pieces. LorAnn Oils can summon the mind to distant shores with a breath. Sandalwood can be a memory, or a half-memory and a puzzle. Knowing that such journeys wait inside each bottle, I can rarely stop before whiffing at least a dozen.

On the surface it’s easy to cast myself as a victim of consumer culture. It’s easy to imagine my infant body as an undiscovered island, the conquistadors of shiny new things planting flags of desire and fear in my young mind. Baby Me, all pudge and unbridled want, hears his first commercial on a hospital TV before his eyes ever open. Strangers in conference rooms are parsing and mapping Baby Me’s brain, so that when I am old enough to be “self-sufficient,” I can trade in my time for some money, and trade in the money for some goods and services, and these people can take my money and trade it in for some time of their own. It's a fine system. It’s easy to see these advertisers as vultures or puppet masters. A little too easy. I no longer see this as anyone's fault, or a fault at all.

I no longer feel my compulsion to consume is subtraction from some other, whole person who does not feel he needs to cheat death by delving into shampoo otherworlds and album cover art.

Good soap and delicate incense create miniature universes. They are portals into desert bazaars and hidden groves. Such vials of adventure keep us from grieving overmuch for the aforementioned unlived lives. The world suggested by a colloidal oatmeal exfoliating body scrub isn't a proxy, but a place I wanted to be all along. Holding basil mint soap in my hand while the world around me plods on is terraforming, planewalking, the ingestion of a utopia. And to imagine that 100 such places exist on the same shelf, a whim away from one another...

Eating Bugs For Fun and Profit

Leaning halfway into my trunk to retrieve some groceries, I was enveloped by a curious sound: something like a dozen open mouths full of Pop Rocks. The sound turned out to be the many tiny footfalls of a posse of earwigs. Dozens of them had stowed away in the legs of a roadside furniture purchase. Besides Journey's smash hit "Don't Stop Believing," no other sound is more viscerally, instinctually repulsive. When I say "instinctually," that's exactly what I mean. As humans, insects share a place in our collective psyche with other prehistoric classics like "fire," and "heights."  Of all the actions I could take upon finding a few dozen earwigs in my trunk, my last inclination would be to begin gobbling them up, one by one. Could there come a day when my grocery bags would be willfully filled with insects, instead of just incidentally?

Issues surrounding food scarcity, purity, and origin are reaching new heights of public awareness in the First World. Meanwhile, food shortage is ever an issue in the Third World. (Who knows what's going on in the poor Second World, that seldom-mentioned pariah of global numerical designations.) The question presents itself as we endure The Summer of the Mosquito: why don't we eat bugs already?

First off, we, as a species, always have. Entomophagy, or the human consumption of insects, was practiced by the people of the Ozarks, for instance, long before they were people as we know them. The fossil record tells us that eating termites predates bluegrass by a fair margin. The plenitude of insects in an era when the "spear" was next-gen tech makes eating whatever is crawling on the cave floor an obvious choice.

While desperation has its place in the bug-eating world, many cultures have integrated insects into their cuisine as a matter of choice.

In Columbia, many people enjoy eating ants. Invariably, these ants are specified to be "big butt ants." The hormiga culona  is an ant queen, often roasted and eaten with salt. Eating these ant queens is not limited to indigenous or desperate people in Columbia. The Colombian Ambassador to England, for instance, regularly imports his favorite six-legged taste of home. Objectively, this is no stranger than eating shrimp, but that's the intellect talking. Cultural conditioning is every effective: I still have no desire to eat an ant. (I don't like ordering food by mail.)

Not much of a hunter? Look no further than a Mexican street market for dried roasted crickets, sold by the pound. Aficionados recommend removing the legs before consumption. If you love crickets but don't want to support the cruel cricket livestock industry (that I may have just invented), trapping your own requires naught but a mason jar, some fruit, and some patience.

Grasshoppers are also a popular choice in some regions. Uganda hosts quite the grasshopper trade, with many entrepreneurs using flood lights, sheet metal, and oil drums to "harvest" them. Again, removing the legs and wings is key to good hopper prep.

The people of Cambodia get giddy at the sight of a deep-fried tarantula. Southern Africa loves its mopane worms. And who doesn't love a locust basket with a good brew?

International food chic aside, it seems impossible than Americans could ever embrace a plateful of termites. But is a pile of termites any crazier than a little wooden boat full of raw fish and pleasantly popping salmon roe? A few decades ago, finding a sushi bar in the Midwest was uncommon, to say the least. Now you'll find a few in most major towns. Can the country that brought the world Extreme Sports and punk rock step up and replace pork rinds with locust... rinds?

Well, why would we want to?

Insects are plentiful, nutritious, and may not feel pain or have any sense of individual identity. Insects are also hearty, and adapt easily to artificial breeding climates. This may not matter much to those of us with a Foods For Living around the corner, but the benefit to famine-stricken or low-income regions is obvious. And while America is not "famine-stricken" by any stretch, the harsh truth is that many people go hungry in our country every day.

What about the affluent? After all, insects are as much a delicacy as a last resort in many cultures. What may draw the yoga/smoothie crowd in America is the nutritional content of many insects: they're great sources of protein, fiber, and micronutrients, such as copper and zinc. I've often speculated that labeling anything "Superfood" could move it off the shelf, but crickets may be the limit of that hypothesis.

People professionally concerned with famine and food insecurity, such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, have long advocated eating insects. But the last few years have seen this idea come to the forefront, with edible bug articles featuring heavily in both humanitarian and epicurean circles.

Eating bugs is generally safe, in the way that eating plants is generally safe; you should know what you're eating and prepare them properly. People have indeed died from eating bugs, and the causes of such fatalities are not always clear.

Not everyone agrees with the eating-bugs-to-save-the-planet angle. No, PETA does not approve of eating insects. But they do offer some interesting nonlethal countermeasures for pest infestations in their website's FAQ.

If we in the Western world are to embrace insectile cuisine, we must do something that does not come naturally, by definition: we must allow our intellect to eclipse our instinct. The idea that bugs are gross is embedded deep in our DNA; tickling and itching probably have a lot to do with bugs. But we can adapt, and if the world keeps tacking on a billion people every few years, we'll have to. Even insects eat each other, and they're smart. Even cockroaches know enough to adapt their taste when the situation demands it.

So get with the program. 2 billion people are already doing it. And when you tell your friends that you've become a bug-eater and hear only the sound of crickets in response, at least you'll know where your next meal is coming from.

The Week's Food and Health News Roundup

It's been a busy, crazy week in the food and health world. While I'm sure you're celebrating National Tequila Day (July 24th), take a moment to reflect on developments both local and national:

Dark Horse Nation

The section of the History Channel's website dedicated to Dark Horse Nation, a new reality series about the craft brewing operation from Marshall, MI, tells me I "may also like" the series "Vikings," "Mountain Men," and "Swamp People." I'm not sure if Dark Horse should be offended or flattered. My recent visit to the Dark Horse brewery and beer garden did not suggest a longboat or swampside shack, although the similarities in personnel to the aforementioned cultures was notable. Regardless, a small town in Michigan is going to host its own national reality show about craft brewing, and I'm excited. America is currently in love with small business entrepreneurs who could also be bouncers (Pawn Stars, American Pickers, all those tattoo and motorcycle shows), and I sincerely hope Dark Horse Nation lives up to its lofty name. The auto industry it ain't, but a third nationally-recognized microbrewery is a great feather in the cap of my favorite state.


Horrock's: Now Hiring Bouncers Who Can Recommend a Good Smoked Gouda
We all know you shouldn't grocery shop when you're hungry. What about tipsy? Horrock's, whom FFL considers a friendly neighbor too far away to be competition, is just the place to find out. Horrock's Farm Market in west Lansing is offering 30 taps of beer and glasses of wine at a new walk-up bar. Horrock's joins a prestigious list of casinos and gentlemen's clubs in encouraging their customers to imbibe throughout a visit.


No MERSy

The Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronoavirus, who prefers to omit the "C" from its acronym to differentiate itself from the Minnesota Employee Recreation and Services Council, may be an airborne malady, according to a paper published this week on the website of the American Society for Microbiology. (The Minnesota Employee Recreation and Services Council had no comment when I contacted them about this potential PR nightmare.) There have been 288 deaths since MERS's appearance in 2012, with 836 confirmed cases of infection overall, according to the WHO. WHO? The World Health Organization. When something like this happens, the WHO's on it first.

The deal is this: dead MERS particles can be transmitted through the air, in scenarios including sneezing camels, but it is unclear whether live, infectious MERS can actually be contracted through the air. So, steer clear of camel noses, and you should be fine. You may also want to avoid Minnesota until this all blows over, just to be safe.


Listeria Hysteria

An outbreak of Listeria monocytogenes at the Wawona Packing Company has people tossing more fruit than a bad production of Romeo and Juliet. The very serious Listeria was found on some stone fruits (two nectarines and a peach) during internal quality control at Wawona. This has prompted a nationwide recall, affecting customers of Kroger, Whole Foods, Wal-Mart, Trader Joe's, Ralph's, and others. You know who has nothing to worry about? The shoppers of Foods For Living. (I'd love to say this has something to do with curating an entirely organic produce section, but it doesn't.)


Supersurprise Me
Perennial punching bag McDonald's is in the news again. Shanghai Husi, a meat supplier for the fast food giant, has drawn the ire of the Chinese government—never a grand idea—after footage was captured of employees using their bare hands to pick up meat from the floor and process it. Many other fast food companies have severed ties with Shanghai Husi, but Ronald is more forgiving, and has no such intention. KFC, among many others, will no longer be sourcing meat from Husi, so we can be sure our genetically engineered, beakless football chickens will continue to meet the same exacting standards.

Bread of State

Whether you think the First Lady is a crusader for fitness and a great role model for healthy living, or a draconian dictator telling us what we can and cannot eat, she is certainly passionate about good food, children, and health. This week, the White House hosted the second annual Kid's State Dinner, where contest winning junior chefs traveled from around the country to enter a charged diplomatic environment in an attempt to broker a peaceful solution to the Ukraine crisis dine with the First Lady. The contest, sponsored by website Epicurious and the Let's Move! initiative, brings together young chefs from all fifty states, with the aim of promoting healthy cooking and celebrating culinary virtuosity. Watch the dinner in its two hour entirety, if you're into that sort of thing.

Good luck out there, be safe, and remember, tequila is like food news itself: clear, and best consumed in small doses.

Sci-Fi Food: Where Is It Now?

Every time the Jetsons make a meal, I roll my eyes. In an otherwise unfailingly realistic depiction of the future, the imagination of 1962 got the future of food very wrong. We're two years past the end of the world, and I have yet to eat a sandwich prepared by a robot (unless you count the average Subway employee). Robots build our cars, which will soon drive themselves, but making an omelet is apparently too much to ask.

While science fiction predicted bullet trains, cloning, space travel, holograms, laser weapons, flying cars, the Internet and so much more, sci-fi's predictions about food usually end up way off the mark. I, for one, am feeling jilted. Let's check in on sci-nonfi's progress with building the meals of tomorrow, if only to mock their attempts at improving our lives.

Food Pills

"Make you own sandwich, mister."

We all know a woman's place is in the kitchen—supervising and offering commentary as her husband makes dinner. (Joke. This may not be exactly how gender dynamics work in your kitchen.) In fact, I can't make any assumptions about the distribution of labor in your kitchen, or even the makeup of your family unit, since a number of social reforms have shed us of these assumptions. This wasn't always the case, of course. There was a time (like 1893) when I could have comfortably assumed who would be preparing the meals around a given home. And doing the dishes.

Women like Mary Elizabeth Lease had other ideas, however. A gifted orator and suffragette, Lease's contribution to the World's Fair of 1893's Visions of the Future project was, in fact, a meal replacement pill. Well, at least the idea for one. Whereas we might utilize such a pill to facilitate an active lifestyle rife with commutes and long hours, Lease's goal was something much more humanitarian: she wanted to free women of her day from the shackles of the kitchen, for the purpose of pursuing horizons beyond domesticity. Unfortunately, Lease was big on ideas and short on practical food science.

But that was over a century ago. What's stopping us now? A simple problem of physics. As you may have noticed, stores already carry food pills. These are known as "supplements," or "vitamins." And while they may provide nutritional essentials and prevent deficiencies, they cannot replace food. We simply cannot pack enough calories into such a compact form factor. Even pure fat—which is loaded with calories—can't approach the amount of calories necessary to constitute a meal. If you want a satisfying meal-in-a-pill, the pill is going to be the size of a softball.

The real-world applications for superdense meal replacement solids have evolved from feminist ideal or fantasy of convenience into treatments for acute malnutrition. Products like Plumpy'nut, a peanut paste manufactured by a company named Nutriset, are intended for medical emergencies, with a focus on combating third world food scarcity. Plumpy'nut contains peanut paste, milk, vegetable fat, and sugars, with the express purpose of pulling patients from the clutches of famine. Plumpy'nut and other foods designed to combat malnutrition fall under the banner of Read-to-Use-Therapeutic Food (RUTF). From what I understand, this is different than Comfort Food, which is intended to be consumed alongside ice cream, and no less than four (4) episodes of a serial drama.

But if you want that sci-fi thrill of popping a full meal-tasting morsel, you may be in luck. Except you'll have to settle for gum. Scientists at the Institute of Food Research in Norwich, England have developed a technique of storing flavor bursts in "microcapsules." The skin of these microcapsules can be engineered to withstand different amounts of pressure. The result is a single piece of gum (or pastry) that reveals different flavors throughout your chewing experience. Yes, I also see a horrific future in which a vast and pretentious gum culture arises, ultimately ruining the bottom of every public table everywhere.

Food-O-Matic

Most families of the future, as well as star ship crews, need only press a few buttons and wait before a machine synthesizes the food of their choice in seconds. This is another advance that has failed to materialize. We can use 3D printing technology to build guns, or even buildings, but the closest we have to full meal assembly is that contraption from the opening of Pee Wee's Big Adventure.

But tech moves in cybernetic baby steps, often taking countless iterations and subgenerations to comprise what we think of as a leap.

In other words, you can't print your food yet, but you can print a mush version of certain foods. German company biozoon is pioneering "food texturizers for the molecular gastronomy." Want some edible Martini foam? How about some senior-oriented...nutrition cubes...? The future is now!

Speaking of textural advances in food and space travel, NASA, the more fun of the two government agencies whose names contain the letters "N," "S," and "A," is funding an Austin-based company's research into 3D food printing, with spacefaring in mind. NASA says that the possible advantages of this technology would be significant, including longer shelf life, better storage options, and greater variety.

We may not be teleporting food just yet, but this era does contain some amazing advances: a hat that facilitates the drinking of two cans of beer, anyone? A sushi restaurant with a conveyor belt!? Skynet will be making you omelets before you know it. Literally.  

Talking to Your Kids About Food Songs

Would you trust this man alone with your citrus?

It's the moment every parent dreads: your child approaches you with Led Zeppelin II in his hand and asks why the heck someone would write a song about a lemon. Being prepared goes a long way in talking to your kids about food music. Simply read the included text verbatim to your children, and the discussion will be over before you know it. It's better than learning about foods songs from somebody on the school bus.  

Weird Al Yankovic's Michael Jackson Trilogy

If, like me, you considered Michael Jackson's entire career a staging area for three brilliant Weird Al Yankovic parodies, you've already noticed that 100% of said parodies are about food. Jackson's music was so much raw dough to be baked in the oven of Yankovic's genius. Behold.

Jackson's "Bad" evolved from a meditation on his own ineffable rebel charm into Yankovic's "Fat": a heartbreaking confessional about struggling with obesity. (Actually, Al's song is, if anything, more confrontational—but that's just the belligerence of a deep sadness.)

The butterfly to MJ's larva.

The King of Pop's "Beat It" was a tired meditation on the fight or flight response, which is right up there with "love" in terms of innovative pop music topics. Weird Al decides to go soul searching in his version. Adopting the persona of an overbearing parent, Al dredges up all the worst nags in dinner table admonishment for "Eat It." As the song progresses, we see how genuine concern for a child's nutritional well-being can so easily slip into pathological browbeating.

Not content to simply cash in on the controversy surrounding The King of Pop's 1991 smash "Black or White," Weird Al prudently mutates the song into a series of reflections about his unnatural attachment to between-meal eating and the resulting fallout. "Snack All Night" is essential Yankovic.

"Peaches," by The Presidents of the United States of America

The lyrics to this nineties novelty are not exactly fertile ground for literary criticism. In fact, they're not really ripe for any criticism, being a string of celebratory innuendos. To the Presidents' credit (?), singer Chris Ballew claims the song is an autobiographical lament about his experience squeezing the fruit under a tree after being stood up for a romantic rendezvous. Less to their credit, the song liberally borrows from Bad Company's "Feel Like Makin' Love," a sentiment that is also, arguably, the song's real raison d'être.

"Cherry Pie," by Warrant

The Cadillac of singles.

Cherry Pie may be the only song about food that took less time to write than the titular food does to prepare. According to Warrant frontman Jani Lane, the song was penned in about fifteen minutes. The song's initial conception was scrawled down on...wait for it...a pizza box. (The box is on display at the Hard Rock Cafe in Destin, FL. This is not a compelling enough reason to visit Destin, I assure you.)  If you like this song, but want something a little sweeter, just stick it in a blender, and you'll have...

"Pour Some Sugar On Me," by Def Leppard

At least the drummer didn't lose his sugar pourin' arm. A micrometer-thin veil separates this food song's spirit from its ostensible subject matter. The tune never even specifies the type of sugar involved in the entreaty. We can assume it's HFCS if the song's own unavoidability is any indication. Though a bit off-color, this is by no means the most polarizing song about sugar. That honor goes to...

"Brown Sugar," by The Rolling Stones

Though legendary rock critic Robert Christgau calls this classic shack shaker "beyond exegesis," it is more prudence than awe that keeps our visit brief. Suffice it to say this is the entire rock cliche triad in one song, with some baffling references to great crimes of the past thrown in for good measure.

"Sugar, Sugar," by the Archies

Act now and get this collectible coaster.

Ah, finally. An honest-to-goodness song simply celebrating the virtues of...kissing? Kissing!? The title is twice as misleading as necessary! Who comes up with this stuff, Little Caesar? Next!

"Savoy Truffle," by the Beatles

A bouncy little song, as sweet as the name implies. Supposedly a song about Eric Clapton's love of chocolate, it's wise to remember that nothing is as it seems in the word of sixties food songs. This trend would change when a spate of literalism found its way into the titling tendencies of rock's icons. (See "Cocaine," by Eric Clapton, which is about cocaine, or "Heroin," by the Velvet Underground, which is about heroin, despite the banana on the cover.)

"Cheeseburger In Paradise," by Jimmy Buffett

Jimmy Buffet needs no introduction—either you know who he is, or you'll never need to. It should be no surprise that a man with an all-you-can-eat surname rose to fame on songs about epicurean delights. Though he is also fond of margaritas and Peanut Butter Conspiracies, it is "Cheeseburger In Paradise" that boasts an accompanying chain of restaurants. (Technically, Margaritavilles are only cafes...) Besides being awesome for taking a non sequitur cheap shot at the Holiday Inn hotel chain, Cheeseburger In Paradise is an oddly literate monologue of deranged craving borne by too much time at sea. It's pretty family friendly, as those go.

"A Cherry on Top," by The Knife

"A Cherry On Top" is from Shaking the Habitual, which one critic called, "A deranged beast running from a pair of fuzzy dice with machine guns." OK, that was less one critic and more just something I said. But it might not be where you'd expect to find a haiku-length song about dessert. The sweet treats invoked inside this song's fever dream borders may not be available on earth. If they are, though, I know where they're served: the diner in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. This song's scant lyrics mention strawberry, melon, and a cherry, before finishing with a reference to coffee, evening cream, and the home of the Swedish royal family—Haga Castle. It's almost nonsense graffiti, but not quite. The warbling soundscape evokes eating a sundae at the bottom of a swimming pool on a sunny day, with little ambition to resurface.

Conclusions:

1. Lyricists overwhelmingly prefer sweets over savory items, at least as fodder for singing mostly vowel-emphasizing pop hooks. 
2. Food songs are never just about food, unless they're for children. This also goes for food blogs. It's good to know this going in.  

I hope this gives you a leg up when it's time to have The Talk. Good luck!

It's Only Natural...and That Means Nothing!

The next time someone tells you something is "only natural," I suggest you say something like, "Do I look like the time of unthinking sheep that jumps on the 'me too' marketing bandwagon!? 'Natural' is a descriptor of parallel worth to 'fine,' 'new,' and 'fresh!' Heap your hype on the pyre, along with miracle cures, limited-time offers, and 'Now with Better Taste!'"

The above response is best suited to discussing "health food," as it is less versatile than you may expect. In the third installment of my Food Industry Information Battle Series (FIIBS), I want to look at what Natural means, why it's ubiquitous, and where we should go from here.

For the readership who enjoys moving pictures and sound, here's a clip which sums up the "Natural" marketing movement nicely:

A proper gander at the propaganda: This video is obviously a propaganda video. It's produced by onlyorganic.org. Who is that? It's a consortium of companies who produce organic products. The list includes Earthbound Farm, Rudi's Organic Bakery, Honest Tea, and many others. These are businesses who enjoy market share because they have gone through the proper channels to ensure their products are Certified Organic. It makes sense that they wouldn't want any old opportunistic company slapping a "Natural" label on its product and becoming a competitor. (Just like "real" doctors are so dismissive about the ones you find on Craigslist.) To their credit, many of these businesses are also run by the original owners and seem genuinely passionate about making food free of harmful additives, GMO, and pesticide. The above propaganda gets my seal of approval, sort of like smoke detector industry propaganda.

So, in the USA, "natural" has no enforceable, consistent definition:

The international Food and Agriculture Organization does not recognize the term "natural" as constituting anything specific in regard to food.

Nice try, SC. You're fooling no one.

The USDA and FDA have no enforceable guidelines for "natural" product labeling. In the USA, you can inject your chicken with lots of salt water, and this is not, by any meaningful definition, unnatural.

Since we know "natural" is a marketing ploy at best, it can't hold any weight over us as consumers, right? Of course not. American shoppers are smarter than that. It's not like pricing something at "$2.99" instead of "$3.00" is actually so effective that it is inescapable...  It's not like we "fall" for mail-in rebates, since we all mail them in, every time. We live in a postmodern, hyper-aware era of consumer agency, where we know every trick in the book. Now if I could just get hold of Kevin Trudeau to send that rebate he promised me...

Or maybe...there wouldn't need to be anti-"Natural" videos if "Natural" wasn't so effective.

We're not in a Kansas "all-natural" beef slaughterhouse anymore...

The resistance to over-processing and wanton additions to food has been going strong since the advent of the modern food industry, predating even the addition of synthetic pesticides to American agriculture in the 1940s. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides worried some folks in Europe, prompting the formation of such organizations as Demeter International of Germany in the 1920s. By the 1940s, there was a robust organization of farmers worldwide who were feeling Aggro about Big Agra's new practices.

20 years later, Silent Spring was published. The next decade saw the banning of DDT and the creation of Organic Certification in the US. Legitimate concerns were birthing an industry, as well as opening the door for marginally effective all-natural deodorant.

1979 gave us not only horror classic Alien, but also the first USDA-approved "natural" beef. One Mel Coleman of Coleman Natural Meat wanted to sell beef from cows raised without antibiotics, hormones, or a meat diet. The USDA said, "No problem, Mel." It is unknown whether Mel was provided with a certificate, or if the matter was resolved in a few minutes of chat over a rotary phone. Despite Coleman's good intentions, a precedent of meaninglessness was set.

A year later, the first Whole Foods opened with a staff of 19. It's hard to imagine WF as a team of anti-Big Agra guerrillas employing less people than the typical Whole Foods Deli. 

28 years later, Whole Foods is posting profits in the billions, with hundreds of stores nationwide, and a once niche industry is such a threat to mainstream grocery that they can't print the Natural labels fast enough.

A cliche about Newtonian physics goes here...

This Cheetah may soon be extinct.

That said, there is growing resistance to Naturalizing things willy-nilly. According to this article from the Wall Street Journal, many huge companies (such as PepsiCo) are jettisoning the Natural label. The resulting lawsuits and bad PR are simply too brand-damaging. Enough class action, action packed lawsuits alleging false advertising, and even the Matrix gets spooked.

"There's a boatload of litigation and that is going to continue until companies stop conning people,'' Stephen Gardner told the WSJ. Gardner is the litigation director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The same article tells us that the percentage of products launched using the "natural" label has fallen by 8% or 11% in the last 5 years for food and drink, respectively.

Looks like Natural Selection to me.

Natural Progression

So, as an average consumer, your preference for Certified Organic over Somewhat Natural is justified. Mother Natural is going to sort this whole thing out, Naturally. The Natural Bandwagon is a sinking ship, and the rats are accordingly jumping off. (Don't worry, they can still get a job as experiment "volunteers." Natch.) 

The War For Your Opinion on Sugar

Ah, the Internet: a forum for the free exchange of ideas. A place where you can learn that each year, Americans consume, per capita, the weight of boxer Sugar Ray Leonard in actual sugar. A place where a few keystrokes can bring you the straight dope on nearly anything. A place where many people have dedicated nine-to-five jobs writing technically and rhetorically erudite articles espousing mutually incompatible "truths." A place where some people will happily deceive you, because it is their job. A place where doctors, plumbers, and that guy from the cell phone kiosk at the mall all go after work to sift fact from fiction, for the pure pursuit of truth. A place where simply Googling "high fructose corn syrup" will expose you to kilos of "real truth" from one of three HFCS information camps: 1) The "HFCS is totally harmless" camp; 2) The "HFCS is the same as table sugar, which is not to say it's harmless" camp, or 3) The "HFCS is the main culprit in many health problems, and should be regulated, if not illegal" camp.

This should not be a metaphysical issue. We are not discussing what precisely would happen if Neo had put the red and blue pills into a smoothy and chugged it.

Meanwhile, Foods For Living does not carry any products which contain HFCS. I've never heard a customer question this decision, and I've heard many praise it. In the wake of reflecting on the Dr.Oz "scandal" and the role of a humble grocery store in a complex national dialogue, I thought it prudent to look a little closer at HFCS, and FFL's decision not to sell it. I mean, they sell alcohol, and that's literally poisonous, so what gives?

Jennifer K. Nelson is the Director of Clinical Nutrition/Dietetics at the Mayo Clinic. She has this to say on the Mayo Clinic website:

"Research has shown that high-fructose corn syrup is chemically similar to table sugar. Controversy exists, however, about whether or not the body handles high-fructose corn syrup differently than table sugar. At this time, there's insufficient evidence to say that high-fructose corn syrup is any less healthy than other types of sweeteners. We do know, however, that too much added sugar — not just high-fructose corn syrup — can contribute unwanted calories that are linked to health problems, such as weight gain, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome and high triglyceride levels. All of these boost your risk of heart disease." Classic Camp 2.

I'd like to point out two things about the above statement. 1) Nelson clearly states the health dangers of a dietary sugar surplus. 2) Nelson is a scientist in high academic standing. This predisposes her to both couching her language in qualifiers—"At this time," "insufficient evidence"—and avoiding prematurely absolute proclamations that could later damage her reputation. This is in no way a criticism of Nelson—it's simply an examination of the tentative, evidence-based statements of presumably impartial health professionals. Having insufficient evidence is certainly not the same as stating that HFCS is simply dandy and nothing to worry about.

What's interesting about Nelson's statement is that it IS incompatible with any statement of certitude regarding HFCS' innocuousness or uniquely harmful effects. The only thing it asserts is that sugar, in excess, is bad.

So what's excessive?

Well, 160 pounds per year, per American is excessive. Since technology evolves much, much faster than biology, we have created a world where we can afford to do something pleasing (eat sugar all the time) that is metabolically destructive. Our bodies still closely resemble those of our ancestors for whom 20 teaspoons a year would have been typical.

But HFCS is delicious. That's why manufacturers put it not just in soda and candy, but bread, "juice," cereal, yogurt, salad dressing, "nutrition" bars, frozen pizza, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese... wait, what? That's right, even pizza and "pasta" aren't safe from the subsidized, sugary tentacles of HFCS.  

"But Greg," you might say,"lacing all those products with sugar in a transparent ploy to sidestep good

sense with deliciousness must be expensive!"
"Wrong, you poor sap!" I'd say. As a corn-derived product, HFCS enjoys the benefit federal subsidies for corn growers. What do the corn growers' associations do with all the that extra money?

Well, lobbying is always nice... though traditional sugar has lobbyists too.

But spiffy "informative" websites don't hurt either: Here's sweetsurprise.com.

If you like your corn info with a side of propaganda, that should do nicely. Meanwhile, here's an article from Princeton, espousing many ideas in radical opposition to the ideas at SweetSurprise.

But, you know, here's an article from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, stating the opposite conclusion of the Princeton article. The AJCN is not a Big Agriculture mouthpiece to my knowledge, so I think we can at very least take their conclusions as being genuine.

But here's another doctor claiming the opposite thesis, again. His presentational style makes me suspicious, but his points sound, to the layperson, valid. Which is the precisely the problem with scientific inquiry in the sphere of media. All reasonably well-stated cases sound equally plausible to the uneducated, myself included.

So what's a local health food store to do?

As dozens of sources from all corners of industry and medicine will tell you, Americans are obese and dying unnecessary deaths, and sugar is a key offender. (Do you really even need to click any of these links to know that?)

Let's imagine your objective was to get out of shape, destroy your body from the inside out, and die as quickly as possible. The only rule is that you must stick to common grocery items and common rates of consumption. Would you go for the wine right away, hoping to induce liver failure with a glass or two an evening? Or would you remember the fine people of Europe, and despair at their long, skinny, wine-sodden lives? Obviously, your best bet would be to do as your countrymen do now. Eat sugary foods, AKA "nearly any foods," constantly. Hope for diabetes. Even "reducing your sugar intake" to a level that is still many times higher than our biology is equipped to deal with will be catastrophic eventually, so don't worry.

Whether or not HFCS doesn't truly require digestion and therefore gets a metabolic wave-on-through from security, or is simply run of the mill sugar, it's not a good idea to consume it endlessly, in great quantities. Since cane sugar is much more expensive and precludes liberal inclusion in every last grocery item, sticking to cane sugar makes it easy to stop killing yourself sweetly. And since the jury is still conspicuously out, even in reputable scientific circles, it just makes sense for Foods For Living to draw a glycemic line in the sand. Whatever your conclusions on HFCS, I suggest looking before you leap (in a huge sugar pile).

I should say now that I come at this as an armchair epistemologist, and not as a member of a specific camp. As always, I express only my own views, and not those of FFL as a whole.