Clean Plate

One Way My Supermarket Tries To Fool Me

Though I do most of my regular grocery shopping online and thus am not regularly subject to the trickery of actual supermarkets , my online market has its own tricks, such as this one: Atop the homepage, there are options to click; I’ve circled “Organic.”

Which you would expect to take you to their organic food section, but when you click on it, it takes you here:

The organic and “all-natural” section. What’s so wrong with that? While the term organic has a specific legal definition and organic producers are inspected and regulated, all-natural has virtually no meaning , or rather, it can mean whatever producers want it to mean.

That’s not the only misleading term  the food industry uses. There are several meaningless and unregulated food terms .

Though the USDA has set forth a definition of natural , without regulation from the FDA, it remains meaningless. However, this may be changing in 2011 .

Before I started researching this project, I was fooled by my market. I’d click on “organic” and when I saw all the products, many of them items I regularly buy, I actually thought Oh good, I didn’t realize that was organic. Marion Nestle’s book What To Eat has lots of great information to help you see through the techniques of the food industry.