Do you have the freedom of choice?

Buying "free range" eggs is one of the easiest ways to feel good as a consumer -- they are at least as readily available as "normal," mass produced eggs from those horrible giant chicken prisons. Hell, they even cost pretty much the same. There's literally no reason not to buy free range.

According to law, the definition of "free range" is that chickens raised for their meat "have access to the outside." OK ... so that's not quite as free as we assumed, and it appears to only apply to chickens raised for their meat. But at least they still have some freedom, what with the outside and all that.

Words have power, and "free range" in its original sense means unfenced and unrestrained. That makes it a powerful phrase that, no matter how smart we are, conjures subconscious images of freedom hens, riding tiny little freedom horses out on the plains, wearing hen-sized cowboy hats and leaving a happy little trail of delicious freedom eggs in their wake. There may be mandolin music.

But the reality is there are absolutely no regulations whatsoever for the use of the term "free range" on anything other than chickens raised for their meat. The bar of chocolate in your hand could be free range for all the government cares.

Freedom redefined

The industry knows this full well and happily makes us lap up the free range myth, even though in reality a free range hen lives in pretty much the same prison as battery cage hen - except its whole life takes place in a prison shower, rather than a cell.

Awareness of the free range myth is slowly increasing, but although a manufacturer that has been pushing his luck a bit too much does get it back from animal rights every once in a while, that doesn't do much to the overall phenomenon. In fact, Europe is set to ban egg production in cage systems come 2012. Shall we too?

And that’s how the cookie crumbles

Imagine a blueberry muffin.

Even with your freshly gained knowledge that there may or may not be wood pulp in the cake mix, it's pretty impossible not to start salivating at the thought, right? This is largely because of the berries themselves. What's better -- they're so very, very healthy that it's almost wrong for them to taste so good.

Everything is better with blueberries -- that's why they put them in so many foods, cakes, cookies, muffins, you name it. Now that we think of it, there sure seems to be a lot of blueberries in a lot of products. You'd think we'd see more blueberry fields around ...

The Horror:

... not that it would do any good, as the number of blueberries you've eaten within the last year, that have actually come from such a field, is likely pretty close to zero.

I can hear it mocking us

Studies of products that supposedly contain blueberries indicate that many of them didn't originate in nature. All those dangly and chewy and juicy bits of berry are completely artificial, made with different combinations of corn syrup and a little chemist's set worth of food colorings and other chemicals with a whole bunch of numbers and letters in their names.

They do a damn good job of faking it, too -- you need a chemist's set of your own to be able to call the con. You can sort of tell them from the ingredient lists, too, if you know what to look for, although the manufacturers tend to camouflage them under nonesense terms like "blueberry flakes" or "blueberry crunchlets."

There are a number of major differences between the real thing and the Abomination Blueberry: The fake blueberries have the advantages of a longer shelf life and, of course, being cheaper to produce. But they have absolutely none of the health benefits and nutrients of the real thing. This, of course, doesn't stop the manufacturers from riding the Blueberry Health Train all the way to the bank, sticking pictures of fresh berries and other misleading cues all over the product packaging.

And how do they dodge officials? A bunch of products actually contain an unspecified amount of real berries. This way they can legally advertise natural flavors while substituting the vast majority of berries with the artificial ones.

So next time you choose blueberry cheesecake over carrot cake, think again…till of course we find out that the carrot is actually redwood shavings…

How the creative juices flow

Quick, name the healthiest drink your nearest store has to offer. You said orange juice, didn't you? It's what everybody makes you drink when you get sick. Hell, that thing must be like medicine or something. And the labels are always about health benefits -- the cartons scream "100 percent natural!", "Not from concentrate!" and "No added sugar!"

Bottled divinity

And why not believe them? When it comes to making the stuff, orange juice isn't sausage. You take oranges, you squeeze oranges, you put the result in a carton, with or without pulp. End of story, beginning of deliciousness.

But what if we told you that "freshly squeezed" juice of yours can very well be a year old, and has been subjected to stuff?

The Horror:

Ever wonder why every carton of natural, healthy, 100 percent, not-from-concentrate orange juice manages to taste exactly the same, yet ever so slightly different depending on the brand, despite containing no additives or preservatives whatsoever?

The process indeed starts with the oranges being squeezed, but that's the first and last normal step in the process. The juice is then immediately sealed in giant holding tanks and all the oxygen is removed. That allows the liquid to keep without spoiling for up to a year. That's why they can distribute it year-round, even when oranges aren't in season.

There is just one downside to the process (from the manufacturers' point of view, that is) -- it removes all the taste from the liquid. So, now they're stuck with vats of extremely vintage watery fruit muck that tastes of paper and little else. What's a poor giant beverage company to do? Why, they re-flavor with a carefully constructed mix of chemicals called a flavor pack, which are manufactured by the same fragrance companies that formulate CK One and other perfumes. Then they bottle the orange scented paper water and sell it to you.

And you thought one gulp of this would make your breakfast complete…Sigh.