The Health Food Aisle

Recently I took an impromptu trip to the grocery store to buy organic sucanat. Now before you become too impressed with me and my healthy ways, you should know a couple of things:

1)   I was inspired to make baked apples from a recipe I saw in a Clean Eating magazine. Not my regular reading fare but something that looked new and interesting to me. Organic sucanat was on the ingredient list.

2)   I had no idea what organic sucanat was and had to Google it to find out if I was looking for an animal, vegetable or mineral once I got to the store.

Turns out it is dehydrated cane juice or “free-flowing organic brown sugar perfect for baking”.  Okay, that makes sense. Maybe.. At least I had an idea of what it might look like. Off to the grocery store I went!

The most logical place I would find this magical organic sucanat would be in the organic foods aisle (of course) so I headed through the crowds to look at all things health food.  As I approached the aisle I noticed that the volume of activity and noise decreased dramatically. In fact, what I saw when I rounded the corner struck me as sort of funny.  There were 4-5 people in the aisle. All were standing silently in front of the shelves, each with a different item in their hand and each was studying the product in their hands with the furrowed brow of concentration.  This made me giggle. I desperately wanted to blurt out, “Hey, you’re in the organic food aisle for goodness sake!  Isn’t that enough for you? Isn’t the fact that you are shopping in the organic food aisle like a free pass from the nutrition gurus? No matter what it is you are studying so intently, it should be good for you, right?”  But I didn’t dare say anything. It was like being in a library with an overzealous librarian nearby. I neither spoke nor dared to make eye contact with these students of the organic.

This made me very curious. So I grabbed my organic sucanat and wandered down to the chip aisle. Just as I suspected. No one in the chip aisle was studying the ingredients. In fact, they didn’t even bother turning the bag over. It was like a little Mardi Gras going on down there! Happy, smiling people throwing crinkly bags of who knows what into their cart, high fiving each other, without a care in the world! Okay, well I didn’t actually see them high fiving each other but I’d like to think it could happen.

Two ends of the spectrum right here in Festival Foods. What to do…. What to do……

As usual, I controlled myself. I took my sucanat, ran over to the ice cream aisle, grabbed some maple nut ice cream and went on my merry way.

Keep on smiling!