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!