Have you heard the term “Greenwashing?” Even if you haven’t, perhaps you’ve noticed the vast increase in availability of things at the supermarket that have pretty, healthy-looking little green labels. It’s so nice to have so many healthful options… or is it?
Not all that long ago in the East Texas/Shreveport area, real health foods were hard to find. I remember the days of driving from one farm in one town to get pastured, non-GMO-fed eggs, then to another farm in yet another town to get grass-fed beef, then still another farm in still another town to get raw milk. It was farm-driving madness! And to find grass-fed beef or pasture-raised eggs at the store? Ha! Fat chance!
But now you can find organic diapers, organic pop-tarts, organic banana puffs, even organic gummy bears and lollipops at just about any well-stocked supermarket. (And of course, there are quite a few organic and “grass-fed” meat options, now, too, but maybe those labels don’t mean exactly what we’ve been led to believe they mean…) But deep down, we all know that a lollipop, organic or not, is just a hunk of sugar. Don’t we?
It seems to me that there’s a psychological component to eating. If something is presented as officially “healthy,” we sort of turn off our brains and chow down, forgetting the logical reasoning we normally step through before buying a product.
More than once, I have found myself victim of this. I was shopping at a new store and spotted a package of roasted peanuts that had a pretty little “With Sea Salt” label on the front. Autopilot kicked in and I didn’t even look at the label before putting it into my basket. My mind said, “Safe!” because that product had effectively been “green-washed,” and it wasn’t until I was 2/3 of the way through eating the jar that I finally happened to look at the label. It was shocking! Full of stuff that I always avoid, and I certainly would never have bought it if any of those other ingredients had been listed on the front of the package. How frustrating!
Has that ever happened to you? I bet it’s happened to even the most conscientious shopper. I learned my lesson, but how many different kinds of products do we each buy? Do we have to learn our lesson on every single one?
The prevalence of health claims and organic labels has effectively given shoppers full license to grab anything off the shelf and assume it is healthier than its conventionally-made counterpart. Be honest. How many times have you tossed that pack of cookies into your cart thinking it’s somehow healthier than the name-brand? But is it really? It’s still cookies! So maybe it was raised without synthetic pesticides or genetically-engineered organisms (GMOs). But that doesn’t equate with nutritious or beneficial.
This article isn’t intended to guilt you out or to encourage you to buy the cheaper conventional junk! Organic junk food is notoriously expensive! Haha. No, that’s not the point. Let’s work harder to keep our brains turned on while we’re shopping and keep the processed food, organic or not, to a minimum, and eat real, whole-food ingredients made into real meals with our own hands, even if they are simple, like scrambled eggs and homemade hash browns. Because that’s really what we need to truly improve our health, don’t you think?
