(Ha, God only knows what kinds of Google searches will pull up that title.  Hi, new readers!  This is a food blog.  Sorry.)

I’ve been talking lately with friends about food marketing and making informed choices about what goes into our bodies.  In one conversation, a friend was saying a packaged snack was good for her, because it was labeled organic.  Later, I was talking to a friend about why I avoid processed vegetable oil.  He lamented that it’s hard to keep track of everything bad for you.  It’s true; there is a vast amount of complex information available about nutrition, and a lot of mainstream messages are simply wrong. (“Avoid saturated fat!”  “Oprah’s favorite exotic berry is a miracle ingredient!” etc.)

But it’s your body.  You get to choose what goes in it, right?

By far, I think the makers and markers of processed foods are the worst culprit when it comes to getting us to ingest things that are bad for us, and leading us to lose control over what we put in our bodies.  The pervasiveness of processed foods is fed by a societal attitude that we can’t make food for ourselves, and buoyed by an unhealthy dose of convenience and marketing.

Take the Men’s Pocky in this picture.  First of all, I have two confessions.  The first is that, although I no longer eat it, I love Pocky -- a chocolate-dipped cookie stick, which I first found as a student in Thailand (along with Collon, an aptly-named small tube-shaped snack filled with dark chocolate).  The second confession is that I think the idea of men’s Pocky is hilarious.  Maybe your cultural messages also tell you that the idea of male-specific Pocky is ironic and funny.  If so, try adding “Men’s” before any food name that’s trying to manipulate you into a purchase (Men’s Organic Spirulina Acai Juice!) and the added laughter might take the magic out of the marketing. 

As funny as the name is, Men’s Pocky is a reminder that all marketing, whether or not it works on you, is ridiculous.  That also goes for most most packaged, processed so-called health foods, often made by large corporations pretending to be small companies.  Such products often highlight one alleged benefit: they’re organic, or they’re wheat-free, or they’re whole grain (which, if the grains haven’t been fermented/soaked/sprouted, brings a whole host of other nutritional problems).  And so, health-conscious people buy snacks that they’re convinced are good for them.  Often, these same products are full of refined vegetable oils, sugars, preservatives, improperly treated grains, or simply ingredients that you would be more likely to find in a chemistry lab than a home kitchen. 

Sometimes the nutritive marketing information on a package is correct (e.g. unrefined coconut oil is a healthful saturated fat, which my coconut oil jar tells me).  But a package should not be trusted as your primary source of information. 

As we outsource our food production further and further from our own kitchens, and more into the profit-oriented corporate realm, we have less knowledge of what really ends up in our food.  If that sounds paranoid, think of contamination scandals, like the recent appearance of melamine in infant formula in China and, yes, the United States.  Oh, and know what else had traces of melamine significantly above the legal limit?  The cream coffee flavor of Men’s Pocky.  I don’t know about you, but that’s enough to make me stop laughing.

The best way to avoid detrimental ingredients is to be in control of your food production.  Make your own food from simple ingredients that you recognize, preferably ones you buy from a farmer and not a corporation.  If you use a pre-made ingredient (e.g. store-bought butter or oil), know how it’s produced.  It’s easy to slip something unwholesome into a box of packaged crackers.  It’s pretty hard to slip it into soup I make from scratch out of simple ingredients I bought at the farmers market.

Yes, I’d like detrimental ingredients out of the food supply to begin with.  Abolish cottonseed oil.  Send high fructose corn syrup to its watery grave.  But I know my standards for what I want to put in my body are more stringent than many people’s, and I do believe in choice.  However, I also believe most people are making unformed choices, through little to no fault of their own.  I mean, if the box of crackers says things like “Whole grain!”  “0g Trans Fat!” “Heart Healthy Choice!” that means it’s good for you, right?  Right? Not really, no.

There is a great deal of politics and corporate interest tied up in the marketing of processed foods, and our bodies suffer as a consequence.  That bothers me individually and politically.  Healthful food should be a right, not a privilege, and that involves both increasing access to nutritive food and restricting manipulative marketing so we can make meaningful choices. Not only do I believe we have the right to make our own choices about our bodies (in nutrition and every other realm), but I believe we have the right to accurate, non-misleading information.

Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen any time soon.  Most packaged foods are non-optimal, if not downright detrimental.  So, when considering whether you want to eat them and which ones you want to eat, I see two fairly healthy choices:

Choice 1. Don’t eat most -- or any -- packaged, processed, or pre-prepared foods.  It sounds difficult to some, but I find this the easiest and healthiest approach.  Shop at a farmers market, buy directly from small farms, and stick the outermost sections of the supermarket where the simpler ingredients live.  Avoid most pre-made food from stores or restaurants, which has the added benefit of saving you money.  If you’re overwhelmed with the amount of nutrition information out there, avoiding packaged and processed foods will, in one stroke, cut out a lot of what you want to avoid. 

Choice 2.  Eat some packaged foods, and learn about ingredients.  Okay, so you really like Veggie Booty and, damnit, there’s that frozen dish at Trader Joe’s you can’t live without.  Well, I hope you like learning about nutrition as much as I do because it’s time to do some serious reading.  Learn as much as you can about untreated grains, sugars, preservatives, processed oils, fatty acids, fillers, and phytochemicals, and other things of which processed foods are full.  Then, figure out your own threshold of what you do and don’t want to eat.  This may start off as a frustrating and slow process, but soon it may not take you long to read a list of ingredients.  At least you’ll be aware, and be choosing, what you put inside your body.

A third choice, I suppose, is to eat processed, packaged foods fairly indiscriminately.  I hope you won’t choose that, but if you do, at least know that what you’re eating is probably not good for you, no matter how much marketing jargon is on the box.  If you’re going to put unhealthy things in your body, make it your own decision.  Be conscious of marketing and try not to let it manipulate you.

And finally, whatever you choose, speak up about insidious marketing of unwholesome foods, or manipulative marketing to increase our addiction to processed foods.  The next time you see cookies that claim to be healthful but are full of cottonseed oil, or cereal that’s marketed to kids but full of ingredients that will make them sick, or snacks that promise to bring you fulfillment in life... look at the ingredient list and say, “You want to put WHAT inside me?”  Even if you choose to eat it, at least you’ll know what you’re getting into. 

Postscript:

Confused about a packaged, processed food, but don’t want to give it up just yet?  Want to know what’s in it, and what to be worried about?  Post it in the comments, and I’ll do what I can to help, or find somewhere to point you for information.  Include the ingredient list if you can, or include the product’s full name (including any scary qualifiers like “lite” or “spicy wombat flavor”) and I’ll look it up.

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