Are you being a smart shopper, the natural claim.

In our quest to educate the common shopper about the marketing mumbo jumbo that mean nothing, here is the second of the series on “Are you being a smart shopper?”

Marketing claim: All Natural!

After a lifetime of eating, no words mean less to me than "all natural." Bottled water claims to be 100% NATURAL* CALORIE-FREE. Why did anyone speculate that I'd think differently? Was there a conspiracy going around that their product was bottled android sweat? Outside of a hydrogen fuel cell, where does one even find unnatural water?

On that same bottle of what I assume was non-voodoo water, I searched for the asterisk referred to by "100% NATURAL*" and it led to the explanation, "*100% Natural Ingredients." Oh, ingredients. I thought water is an ingredient. What ingredients would water need, apart from Hydrogen and Oxygen of course? Then why do I need to be told that both Hydrogen and Oxygen are naturally occurring substances? Wait, is there an unnatural version of the two!?

Marketers, you know, we have kinda evolved from this.

Common sense should tell us that “natural” is anything that occurs naturally (DUH). If food scientist could prove that cat urine can add a zing to a certain flavor without serious health impacts, it can be totally labeled “natural”.

Here’s the funny part, the FDA doesn't even define the word "natural," so it's used by a variety of food manufacturers in an effort to imply their products are somehow better for us. We've seen it on everything from potato chips to cereal boxes. The USDA, on the other hand, allows meat and poultry to be labeled "natural" if they don't include artificial colors or ingredients, and are not more than "minimally processed." But the rest of the food supply's definition of natural is up for grabs.

There have been instances when yeast has been treated with MSG and called “all natural” because the company just chose not to mention the MSG bit. In fact a few rather well known companies have had to call it quits with the marketing jargon. It is easy to identify when the companies are faking it. Corn syrup, and partially hydrogenated soybean oil are the regular suspects that feature on “all natural” ingredient list.

Of all the products meaninglessly described as "all natural," I think I have the most problem with fruit juice. What loathsome lack of ethics would allow someone to make synthetic fruit juice? And how in the world would it be easier than making it the regular way? Do you hold a jar under the farmer while he jogs? Do you extract from a dumpster outside a Chinese restaurant? Any factory worker trying to squeeze will tell you: artificial fruit juice is more trouble than it's worth.

The consumers are also to be blamed. If we want fruit juice, and we insist on it being “all natural”, what stops us from making it at home? We look for convenience (a little too much in fact) and then we crib that companies take us for granted. If you want it your way, then make it your way. If enough number of consumers wake up to it companies are bound to notice it.

Are you being a smart shopper?

I sometimes feel that marketers are no longer being serious. For some reason they assume that consumers are morons and are very satisfied with their “duh” marketing initiatives.

I sense a requirement for an explanation here: Duh Marketing is when a product makes a claim so obvious that it's inconceivable why you thought otherwise. Like an energy bar that "Helps Satisfy Appetite!" or a fruit juice that "Contains 100% Daily Value of Vitamin C per serving!" Did you know that 100% DV of Vitamin C is so little that it's the bare minimum to avoid scurvy? If you accidentally drop a grapefruit in a corn syrup plant you'll contaminate everything with 100% DV of Vitamin C per serving.

Am I screaming loud enough? Will they believe me?

In the interest to save ourselves from spontaneous combustion out of shame, I have decided to deconstruct the claims plastered all over your shopping experience. Here’s the first of the series.

Marketing claim: Real

A lot of food claims to be real, but it's never really made clear what the alternative to that is. Or, for that matter, what is “unreal” food? For example, if you read the ingredients on a jar of mayonnaise and a jar of REAL mayonnaise, you'll see they're exactly the same. If there's any difference at all it's usually that "fake" mayonnaise contains modified corn starch and xanthan gum - two thickening additives with the nutritional value of sawdust.

"Real" has very little meaning in food. You can say a cat food has REAL chicken flavor because your cat doesn't know how to call you a liar. But sometimes "real" on a food implies actual legal classification.

For example, on a box of cookies, the words "real chocolate" appears. A quick check of the real chocolate ingredients, and I see that it's made of five things, no one knows what two of them are, and chocolate isn't first.

From the FDA's perspective, "real chocolate" means a candy with actual cocoa butter in it, the thing that gives it its creamy texture and a melting temperature of human mouth. This doesn't quite add up either, since biting into the chocolate chip gave me dental expenses and it had the texture of an ancient brick. 

And with that we can launch our dental care division

Another example with “real” claims will be instant soups and noodles with the promise of real chicken, vegetables so on and so forth. I do not deny the fact that the chicken or vegetable they add to the soups were real to begin with.

But then they went through the process of industrial food drying to prevent them from rotting in the packet you take home. Again there is nothing wrong with food drying as a process per say. But most of the industrial food drying uses additives and preservatives, the most dubious being sulfur.

Sulfur is used to preserve the color of some dried foods, like apricots. Fumes from burning sulfur or gaseous sulfur dioxide penetrate the surfaces of foods before they are dried. This adds more chemicals to our already jeopardized lives. And does the term sulfur poisoning ring a bell?

Hate to break the news but, yes, everyone out there is hell bent on conning us. They are probably bored of making better products and have settled for glossy claims. You know after writing this I do see why marketers take us for a ride. Why do you want to look for anything “real” in what you eat directly from a plastic pack anyway? I mean how plastic! If you want “real” then cook it yourself, use the freshest of the ingredients. And if you really want “real” then use organic!

4 bizarre food additives that you consume everyday

Deciphering food labels is tricky business. They're filled with lots of multisyllabic words that border on being impossible to pronounce, chemicals that sound like they could kill you just by touching them, and much, much worse. Read on, unless you've eaten recently ...

#4
Shellac

Most everyone is familiar with shellac as a wood-finishing product. It's often used to give furniture, guitars and even AK-47's that special shine. But did you know it is also commonly used as a food additive? Yep, that's why those lozenges you gorge on are so shiny.

But what exactly is shellac?

Shellac is derived from the excretions of the Kerria lacca insect.

The Kerria lacca uses the sticky excretion as a means to stick to the trees on which it lives. Candy makers use it to make those treats you love so much shiny and beautiful.

Before some health nut out there pipes up to tell us they don't eat candy, we'd like to point out that, during the cleaning process, apples lose their natural shine. Care to guess how it's restored?

#3
Bone Char

Some things are not as they seem. That sugar you put on your cereal in the morning isn't really white. Or at least it doesn't start out that way.

When it starts its sweet, delicious life, sugar is brown--a color deemed to be "undesirable" by the sugar industry. Don't be such racialists, sugar industry! To make the product white, sugar derived from sugar cane goes through a ... different process.

Most sugar whitening processes use bone char to filter impurities from the sugar. Bone char is delightfully produced using the bones of cows that have died from "natural causes," like when cows forget to wear a helmet when riding their motorcycles.

The bones are bleached in the sun and sold to marketers who then sell them to the sugar industry after they've been used by the gelatin industry. What the gelatin industry does with the bones, we don't want to know.

We don't know by what alchemy this method purifies the sugar, we're certainly no scientists. But when you tell us that your purification method involves the ground-up bones of a sacrificed animal, well, we're just going to assume Satan is involved.

#2
Carmine

Carmine can also be identified on food labels as Crimson Lake, Cochineal, Natural Red 4, C.I. 75470 or E120. We mention that because we're guessing you'll want to check for it in the future after reading this.

Carmine is made, literally, from ground-up cochineal insects, which is just a more harrowing way of saying mashed red beetles. Because you're dying to know more, the insects are killed by exposure to heat or immersion in hot water and then dried. Because the abdomen region that houses the fertilized eggs contains the most carmine, it is separated from the rest of the body, ground into a powder and cooked at high temperatures to extract the maximum amount of color.

But the carmine terror doesn't end there. Food manufacturers are well aware that word has gotten out about exactly what carmine is and that people are less than impressed about it. So a number of crafty manufacturers have resorted to labeling it not as carmine, but instead as "natural color," thereby guaranteeing you'll never really know for sure if your cherry ice cream contains the USDA recommended amount of creepy crawlers.

Nice. Hey, speaking of that ...

#1
Natural Flavor

When it comes to food, most of us get nervous when people are intentionally vague. So when you see that a label has included "natural flavor," you should be equally alarmed. If you're thinking the "natural flavor" in your orange candy must obviously come from oranges, think again.

The problem is natural flavor can, literally, be anything that isn't man made. One potentially disturbing example of natural flavor gone bad comes from, where else, McDonald's. Back in 1990, amid constant public outcry about the amount of cholesterol in their French fries, McDonald's started using pure vegetable oil in their fryers.

Wait, what were they using before? Why, beef lard. When they stopped using it, and McDonald's realized fried potatoes don't taste as good without some molten beef added, it was "natural flavor" to the rescue.

When vegetarian groups demanded to know what the mystery flavor was, company reps would only say it was "animal derived."

Hey, nothing unnatural about that!