For the past few months, I’ve been buying the expensive “pasture-raised” eggs from the grocery store. I had heard that they generally contain more nutrition, since the diet of the chickens is more varied and natural, and the eggs themselves are therefore greater sources of omega-3s, etc. I also learned to watch out for green-washing slogans like “cage-free”, which means essentially nothing technically.
But I always have this nagging fear inside of me that I’m being taken for a fool. What if it’s complete bullshit? What if it’s just one giant marketing scam, and only Whole Foods-shopping yuppie losers like me are swallowing the propaganda, dumping money into the pockets of companies that are scoring big dollars off of ignorance? The scary thing is, this happens all the time, so it’s not an unrealistic fear. I just saw a small bag of ground “spirulina” going for $14, and this weird extract of exotic lake algae must be making a number of people rich thanks to dumb Americans who want to jump on every new health craze. “iTs hEAlThY!”
At least as far as the eggs are concerned, I ultimately decided that the company has actually done a lot to prove they are legitimate. There is only so much proof you can really expect, and although I don’t care to see the names of the chickens who laid the eggs (which seems obnoxiously gimmicky), I do get that the company is going out of its way to make their case. The sad truth is, raising/growing food ethically is expensive, since industrialized food has learned to cut so many corners in order to drive prices down and gain greater market share. And, as always, if I’m really concerned about paying too much money for these eggs, I should reassess the money I spend on energy drinks ($4 for a tall can!).
Personally, I’m quite fed up with every company under the sun trying to paint some heroic image of themselves using their “story”. I get that this is a marketing thing, and it satisfies people who don’t understand the nature of dishonesty, so therefore there is a demand for it, but if you look around Whole Foods, far too many companies want you to believe that their entire lives have been dedicating to fighting evil and having a vision for a “better tomorrow”. I’d be happy if they just said, “We wanted to create a product that has fewer strange ingredients in it, to exploit the demand for this, and we also wanted to make money”. Sweet! Honesty. I like that. But as it stands, after they’ve used 30% of the packaging to tell their story, you might be surprised to find that very little is different between them and the blatantly corner-cutting discount brands. It is like – as I seem never to tire of talking about – buying some healthy-looking wheat bread, just to discover that it uses brown sugar to make it look more wheaty than it is, and incorporates many strange flours and ingredients that don’t really make for a healthy loaf of anything. [Have you ever made wheat bread? It’s actually only a shade darker than white bread] “Here at XYZ, we believe in healthier bread!” Oh, fuck off.
To be fair, though, I think you’re less likely to get screwed health-wise when you are buying whole ingredients. Anything frozen that has egg in it is likely loaded with garbage, so to some extent, if you are cooking the eggs yourself, whether they are factory eggs or fancy pasture-raised eggs, you are probably doing your body a huge favor. The difference between something like regular boxed mac-and-cheese and free-range [lol], organic mac-and-cheese is less pronounced, though, because mac-and-cheese isn’t very nutritious in the first place. So even if Vital Farms is royally screwing me over, they can’t likely be screwing me more than I’d be screwing myself if I decided that a frozen pack of egg-sausage franken muffins for $3 is fine breakfast cuisine.
And nobody wants to be taken advantage of, either, but at least trying to learn about the various forms of foods and what to avoid and watch out for is probably good enough. There’s no way you or I are likely to ever be experts on this stuff, so it just makes sense to take things with a grain of salt. Yeah, I like to buy the organic pasture-raised eggs (and sure, the boxes are pretty, too), but I sometimes buy the non-organic. Who cares. I’ve also remembered having great results buying half-boxes of cheap eggs when traveling last year (speaking of, I really need to get out of the house and spend a week in an AirBnB or something). It’s not a big deal, I just like the idea of my weekly diet being more healthy than less healthy. I think the general pattern is more important than worrying about all the little specifics.
On a slightly different note, I found these awesome pre-made tortillas that have no added preservatives and very few ingredients, which just have to be cooked. They’re the perfect size for my cast iron skillet (by design, I’m sure), and it gives me the satisfaction of knowing that even though it’s still white flour, there’s no extra garbage. And It’s like $3 for 12! So all it takes is a little bit of low-key kitchen time to cook them all up.
Assessing how healthy a food is can be extremely difficult, and because humans rely on a varied diet to acquire all of the nutrients they need, it is essentially impossible to test one food in isolation, and even if you did, it wouldn’t be an accurate assessment of what eating that one food does to a person as part of a larger diet. I occasionally watch this YouTuber Bobby Parrish, who does a lot of food health reviews in grocery stores, and I’ve learned a lot from him and his channel. At the same time, though, he treats everything as very black and white, “this is bad for you” and “this is what you want to look for”, but he never really references the studies that prove this one way or the other. Understanding the unique differences you see in various products is valuable, but to say that one or the other is “healthy” or “unhealthy” might be a little too bold in the face of our sheer ignorance how these food truly affect the human body [except in rare cases]. And although fruits and vegetables typically are cheaper at Whole Foods, I rarely leave there without spending $50, which is why I’ve started consciously avoiding Whole Foods, and trying to only go once a week. Some of these “expectations” of health border on severe discrimination against those who can’t afford it, when there’s a lot of evidence that eating healthy doesn’t have to be so expensive. There are a lot of companies who will twist and turn science to make it sound like they have the absolute healthiest product available, and it’s not illegal (although it is almost certainly unethical). If they can’t gain an actual monopoly, then they can try to influence public opinion to make you feel like a terrible person if you aren’t eating the “healthiest” thing, which coincidentally is what they are trying to sell. A little too convenient, huh?
Moreover, people love to feel like experts on health, so they will gladly tell you what is and isn’t healthy, just because they heard someone authoritative say it. I’m not saying nobody is ever right, but some people, I think, follow the propaganda a little too closely, if you know what I mean. I also think that sometimes people become health nuts as a salve for deeper insecurities; focusing on food health becomes a way to escape their negative self-perceptions, a la, “I am not a bad person, I am a good person, I know what is and is not healthy for me, I take care of myself”, etc.). Not everybody, of course, but I’ve known several acquaintances and maybe one old friend who jumped on health crazes in what I consider a desperate attempt to feel good about themselves.
I’m less concerned whether red potatoes are healthier than white potatoes, and more interested in whether I am making them myself, and if not, what odd ingredients have been added and used in their processing? It’s my general contention that these are the more important considerations than whether one food is “healthy” for you or not. Besides, I’ve known several people who are otherwise very healthy who have one key weakness in the form of soda. It would be pedantic to criticize them for that.
Another company strategy is to find an exotic food and to sell it as a healthy product based on the ignorance of consumers. I mean, if it grows naturally in the Amazon, it must be pretty nutritious, right? Sadly, this is actually propping up the world of ethnopharmacology as big pharma (and food) companies scour the world to find plants that have interesting affects. Some of that I’m sure is ground-breaking, but almost all of it violates the rights of natives when these companies rush to exploit resources. Again, that spirulina shit…I mean, seriously?
So, I don’t know. I had another post I made about trying to cut back on grocery spending that explores some of this in greater depth from a cost perspective, but I have a backlog of crappy posts, and I’m not sure which ones are worth sharing. I think I’m okay buying fancy eggs for now, I just want to be really careful how much marketing I allow myself to be influenced by. And seriously, I don’t care what the hens’ names are.