I’m totally
fed up seeing labels of natural products. Seriously! In most supermarkets you
find organic apples, Bio yoghurt and fairtrade coffee. It has become a real
hype and, quite frankly, it’s ridiculous.
Ok, maybe
‘ridiculous’ is the wrong word. I guess ‘sad’ is more appropriate. Let’s take
one of my favourite vegetables as an example: Broccoli. So you go to the veg
section of the supermarket of your choice and see a mountain of Broccoli heads
piled up in front of you, all nicely wrapped in plastic. The sign says
‘Broccoli – 0.99’. Either directly next to it or a few metres away there’s
another mountain, albeit much smaller, with a sign announcing ‘Organic Broccoli
– 1.99’ (usually with a tiny footnote: ‘Natural produce’).
Now, what
happens in the mind of the person doing the shopping? Very often it will be
something like this: ‘Organic…hm, that’s the latest
fashion, isn't it? And any fashion product is always expensive.’ It’s like buying an
iphone, a Hollister shirt or one of those stupid nespresso machines – you don’t
pay for a good product, but mainly spend your money on some fancy marketing campaign. Hence it’s better to buy the ‘normal’ broccoli.
However, when it comes to food, it’s not about fashion at all. There’s nothing cool
about organic food, not even if you spell it organiK (no, I didn’t make
this up – I’ve really seen it like this).
The underlying problem of this whole
dilemma, apart from the weirdly functioning human brain, is totally inappropriate and misleading labeling. Here’s what it should
say on the two signs:
Broccoli –
1.99
Toxic Broccoli – 0.99
And ideally
there’d be also a (huge) footnote attached to the second choice: ‘Sprayed
with pesticides and insecticides; grown with artificial fertilizer in a
monculture – harming the soil and poisining your body!’
I reckon
some idiots would still go for the cheaper option (maybe to save up for the new
iphone?), but most people wouldn’t think twice and would buy the non-toxic
vegetable. Common sense, right? Some more examples:
Cheese –
3.99
Pseudo Cheese – 1.98 (made from milk that comes from cows who have never seen daylight
and are pumped up with antibiotics on a daily basis)
Bread –
2.50
Lethal Bread – 1.09 (stripped of all healthy ingredients and with an extra amount of
conservatives so that it will stay artificially fresh for at least 8 weeks)
Chocolate –
1.99
Slave Chocolate – 0.89 (guaranteed with cacao that was harvested by hungry, underpaid
peasants in the third world)
The list
could go on endlessly… I think all ‘normal’ food should be automatically
organic, cultivated with sustainable methods under fair conditions. All other
food, ie that which is classified as normal today, should be clearly named with
words such as harmful, processed, poisonous, chemical, etc. Since we're still far away from being free-thinking and highly conscious people, only the brutal truth has the power to make us change our habbits – fairytales invented by ruthless advertisement agencies won't help. So:
Kill the
organic hype – bring on the toxic label!
PS: Having
said all this – cigarette packets have been carrying photos of black lungs and
messages of ‘smoking kills’ for many years now, and still people continue to
smoke. Maybe we’re simply too stupid? Aliens, hurry up!
