Things Consumed

 

Supermarkets: *yawn*

Earlier this summer, I had a really funny conversation with a younger person. He was talking about food shopping trends, and how there was an amazing new trend occurring and being observed by researchers: people were going to multiple stores to do their shopping. They might go to TJ's for packaged things, another chain grocery story for dairy products and veggies, another for dry goods, and so one. It was quite a phenomenon.

I laughed, and pointed out that when I was a kid (famous slogan of old people everywhere), my mother would go shopping at several venues: the bakery for bread and baked goods; the green grocer for vegetables and fruit; a butcher for meat; and so on. Thinking quickly, the young person admitted that it was an older shopping pattern, but that it had been less prevalent in the age of supermarkets. Even in my family's case, this was true: my mother's butcher wound up going to work for a chain store, and my mother took her business to that store as a result. When he left, she switched to another chain store for meat, but not for other things - she thought that store was too expensive. So she still wound up going to multiple stores for whatever their strengths were.

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The premise behind supermarkets is that it's "one stop shopping" - you can get everything you want in one place, efficiently, by the cart-full. But ever since moving out of my parents' home, I haven't been a regular supermarket shopper. As a serious food lover & a vegetarian with a desire for unprocessed, natural foods, supermarkets just haven't been the place to go, and are only now catching up on "health" food purchasing trends that have been making headlines.

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Selection

The main area where supermarkets have been lagging is in selection. They're a lot like chain electronics stores: they have aisles full of merchandise, but it's all basically the same, and sometimes literally is the same product with different labels on it. Have you tried to buy cereal in a supermarket? There is usually an entire row devoted to cereal, but most of it is heavily processed, high in white sugar or high fructose corn syrup, and some of it contains GMOs. A lot of it is unhealthy; the healthy products often taste the same as each other, or are even produced by one manufacturer under several brand names at different price points, so you THINK you have a choice between corn flakes, but you actually only have a choice between packages. Health food stores carry a very wide range of naturally sweetened, whole grain cereals that taste better, are healthier for you, and cost less. (There is a reason that health-food gourmands are teased about granola: we have lots of cereal options, and they are surprisingly good.)

How about tomatoes? Year round, the supermarket tomato selection is limited to red round (beefsteak-style) and now roma (pear-shaped red), both of which are slightly pink. If you're lucky, you'll have the option of small red cherry tomatoes at some point during the year. One local health food chain here in the City stocks about 6 varieties of tomatoes throughout the summer, from green grapes (small, round, green, sweet) to yellow pear (vivid, yellow, intense), to zebra (several kinds, including the red with yellow stripes), and ruffled (yellow, red, purple-red, or green with a wildly ribbed shape near the top and very intense flavor). ALL of those tomatoes taste and look better than the uniform, bland-to-mild, round tomatoes in the supermarket. And the serious gourmet specialty stores carry even more kinds.

Potatoes? Supermarkets have russet, and sometimes red. Health food stores have russet, red, Yukon gold, fingerling, Peruvian purple, blue, white... Oh, and the interchangeably labeled yams and sweet potatoes, like Japanese sweet potato, gold sweet potato, ruby yams...

Pesticides, genetically modified organisms, and hormones

Within that selection, there is also a winder range of options regarding the use of chemicals and technology that doesn't benefit me.

Pesticides. When given a choice, most people would prefer to buy produce that does not contain residues of insecticide; those who are concerned with the state of the environment would also prefer that their food not be grown with pesticides, since the chemicals can contaminate land and water, be consumed by other animals, and have a variety of adverse health consequences for many living things. Consumers are willing to pay higher prices for produce that is free of pesticides, and the organic (pesticide free) market has been growing phenomenally in recent years. Organic, pesticide-free veggies are abundant at health food stores, but are still in a little organic ghetto in the produce section of supermarkets. This is largely because big factory farms, which enjoy both certain subsidies and economies of scale, produce cheap "conventional" crops grown with pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, and the supermarkets want to keep their costs low. Since supermarkets don't try to specialize in organic produce, they generally do not succeed in selling much of it.

I'll note here that there are environmental tradeoffs associated with City people like me eating some organic products that are made far away. It may be better for me to eat an organic ice cream from Maine, but the pollution associated with delivering that ice cream to the west coast probably means it isn't better for the planet. Ideally, we should all have local suppliers of great organic products - I'm lucky enough to have several California-based options. Of course, conventional, pesticide-grown products also suffer from this same challenge, and that means that local products are better for the environment than produce grown in South America or cereal boxed up a thousand miles away. Sometimes, local beats out organic because of the shared costs of shipping, but that isn't really a limiting factor, considering the options available in my region.

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are plants or animals which have been modified by scientists at a genetic level to change their characteristics. Many of the early GMO products were designed to make food more likely to be purchased by consumers, without offering any advantages: tomatoes that looked red when unripe and which remained hard (so they wouldn't bruise in transport) were one of the first, much-hyped GMO products to reach consumers. They failed in the marketplace, where it turned out consumers didn't WANT tomatoes that looked red before they were ripe - consumers actually wanted ripe tomatoes! Who knew?

GMOs have interesting scientific potential, but the media tends to represent GMOs as a solution to real problems that could be solved other ways. Scientists are trying to make corn produce medicines, for example, so that someone can grow the corn in an area where the medicine is needed, rather than providing medicines to people who need them. Or to make grains more nutritious in areas where people are suffering from malnutrition because of economic or military crises which prevent people from eating a wide-enough variety of food, rather than support the international community's efforts to manage the overall humanitarian situation. The proposals all sound like band-aid fixes to treat symptoms, rather than the larger problems. Also, many efforts along these lines that were attempted in my childhood - "super" rice and extra-nutritious beans come to mind - failed to live up to their promises. The beans were especially funny - they took more energy (burning wood) to cook, and so were inefficient and rejected by the women who had to cook them, who couldn't justify the additional fuel costs/work.

Pros and Cons of GMOs (ornl.gov) are available from a variety of sources. (Do a search with your favorite search engine for "genetically modified organism" and you'll have many pages of results to choose from.) The list of cons is still rather long. In particular, there have been some nasty instances of contamination of regular crops by GMO crops because of a complete failure of industry to regulate themselves.

In addition to the mismanagement by the GMO industry that resulted in, among other instances, widespread contamination of the US corn supply, I also have ethical issues with the use of animal genes in plants. And frankly, most of the changes being proposed don't benefit me at all. My fresh veggies are doing exactly what they should be doing; my organic veggies are doing so without either genetic engineering or pesticide. GMOs are a solution looking for a problem, or more specifically, looking to solve the problems of the industrial agricultural system, which is a system that sacrifices the environment and common sense for extra yields. I prefer not to support that system, and cannot see GMOs solving the flaws that the system currently has.

Health food stores currently stock a wide range of GMO-free products.

Hormones. Health food stores offer dairy products that are either bovine growth hormone-free (bgh is a hormonal treatment given to lactating cows to get them to produce more milk at a cost to the cow's health) or organic (neither hormones nor pesticides were ingested by the cow). Supermarkets NOW carry some products like this, but often just one of each product, whereas health food stores carry multiple brands, so you have a choice.

One of the reasons I limit my dairy intake is that I don't want to absorb pesticides and hormones from dairy products. There are few that I trust; the sources I do trust certify that their cows weren't treated with hormones and/or are completely organic.

Industry doesn't want me to have this option, and there have been nasty legal battles to prevent the products I buy from being labeled honestly. That's another sign that the food industry does not want me to have any options, and is not looking out for my best interests.

Artificial & "natural" colors, flavors, and preservatives

Throughout supermarkets, the processed, boxed products that occupy the majority of the store space contain a variety of mystery ingredients, including "artificial flavor," "artificial color," and "natural flavors" which may or may not be things that I would like to put in my body.

One of the most widely used color additives -- whose presence is often hidden by the phrase "color added" -- violates a number of religious dietary restrictions, may cause allergic reactions in susceptible people, and comes from an unusual source. Cochineal extract (also known as carmine or carminic acid) is made from the desiccated bodies of female Dactylopius coccus Costa, a small insect harvested mainly in Peru and the Canary Islands. The bug feeds on red cactus berries, and color from the berries accumulates in the females and their unhatched larvae. The insects are collected, dried, and ground into a pigment. It takes about 70,000 of them to produce a pound of carmine, which is used to make processed foods look pink, red, or purple. Dannon strawberry yogurt gets its color from carmine, and so do many frozen fruit bars, candies, and fruit fillings, and Ocean Spray pink-grapefruit juice drink.

-from Truthseeker.co.uk, quoting from Eric Schlosser's book Fast Food Nation.

(See also, the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 21, Volume 2, Ch. 1, Part 101 - FOOD LABELING, especially section 101.22.)

In a supermarket, I have no way of knowing that one brand of juice has bugs added for color, and another does not, even if I read the label, because those bugs could be considered a natural coloring. Meanwhile, at the health food store, I can get grapefruit juice whose only ingredient is "grapefruit juice." Or even "certified organic grapefruit juice." Or "certified organic grapefruit juice, with added beet extract for color." Given a choice between beet extract and the possible addition of ground tropical insects, which would you prefer made your juice pink? I thought so.

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Fresh, natural food is best for me. While there are a few specialty supermarkets that are trying to capture portions of the health-conscious public's food dollar (and doing a decent job of it), mainstream supermarkets, with their shelves filled with processed foods and artificial ingredients, currently have little to offer me.
posted by Arlene (Beth)5:44 PM