Organic Comedy

Anyone who knows me, and in fact, anyone who’s ever laid eyes on me, knows that I love food. It’s so yummy, don’t you agree? But you should know that if I had a choice between a full buffet of sweet, delicious junk food and a full buffet of savory, healthful food, I would choose the healthful food absolutely every time. It’s true. Completely hypothetical, but true. In the real world, where full buffets are quite rare, I am an omnivore. Omni is the Latin word for ‘even if it’s marginally edible’ and vore, also Latin, means ‘I’ll eat it.’

So you can imagine how thrilled I was when a colleague said to me several weeks ago, “Hey, I’m heading next door to Kolesterol King for fried cow flesh and some frozen lard. You wanna come?” Of course I accepted the invitation and there began a beautiful friendship . . . or so I thought. Shortly afterward, this woman underwent a mysterious change. She said she found a book that opened her eyes to the evil acts being perpetrated by the cattle industry, greedy corporations, and David Hasselhoff. She started to know the names of minute ingredients in certain foods and could even pronounce the diseases they cause with commendable accuracy. Her lunches began to consist of things with names like tofurkey sausage, muesli flakes, flaxseed meal, Soy cutash, and cardboard germ. I had known people like this existed. I’d even known some of them personally. But I had never witnessed the transformation from normal to nutty until then.

I’m afraid I had to draw the line on our friendship when this woman offered me a canister of lemon-flavored drink mix because she was clearing her cupboards of things she would no longer ingest.

“What does it have in it that you don’t like?” I asked, mildly curious.

“[Insert barely pronounceable, but apparently potable chemical],” she responded, then added, “It causes cancer. Do you think your family would drink it? It’s a shame to see it go to waste.”

In our former friendship based on trans fats, she never would have wished cancer on my family! Obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart failure, maybe. But never cancer. (I took the drink mix, by the way, and the kids love it.)

As much as I enjoy a good artery-clogging meal, I have to admit I was swayed by her example. I’m trying to be reasonably selective now, and I’m noticing food labels more. One word I see quite a bit is the word organic. At one time I assumed it meant something logical like ‘grown without chemicals’ or even ‘we didn’t mess with this; it’s just food.’ But apparently I was mistaken because I see the word on everything from vegetables (reasonable) to peanut butter (questionable) to Li’l Debbie’s snack cakes (highly suspect). When I see claims of “organic” on such unlikely products, my imagination takes off.

[Wavy fade out and cascading bells please.]

A young go-getter sits in his shiny cubicle. An impressive logo reading “Top Notch Marketing Inc” glistens in the background. He reminisces proudly for a moment on the recent meeting with his boss during which he was assigned a new account: FOOD. Full of confidence and hormones he brainstorms for a word that will bump up sales for the client. And then, without warning, there it is. The word that will change food sales forever: ‘orgasmic.’ But having grown up on spell-check instead of spell-ing, the text-pad instead of the pen, he misprints it, and food containers by the hundreds of thousands leave their factories claiming “organic” instead.

[Wavy fade back to reality and bells cascading in the other direction please.]

But seriously. The principal difference between a regular food product and one marked “organic” is about $17.32. That colleague’s lunches, for example? Each one could have kept my family of five in Froot Snax for several weeks. Let’s see. . . plump, seedless, juicy grapes grown on 100 acre plots for 88 cents a pound versus teensy-weensy, anemic looking, seeded grapes grown on 1 acre plots for $3.99 a pound. Milk squeezed from the udder of a normal cow by a metal clamp attached to a remote pump for $3.10 per gallon. Milk squeezed from the udder of a cow on a special diet by a metal clamp attached to a nearby pump for $7.89 per gallon. There’s really no contest for me. A fashionable explanation for my not partaking of the organic lifestyle would include some reference to “these lean economic times.” But who would I be kidding? I honestly cannot imagine a reality in which a claim of organic would mean more to me than my money, no matter how well the economy were doing.

So, what is important to me when it comes to food? I’ll tell you what. It’s shelf life. Not in the traditional sense, though. I rarely have occasion to worry about my food not staying fresh long enough. My real concern is that it stay present long enough. That’s right. My number one criterion for a good food buy is how long the food is likely to stay in my cupboard. This requires it to not taste so bad that it would never get eaten, but also not taste so good that it would all be eaten on the same day I bought it. I never buy cookies, for example. (Any positive health effects of this decision are purely incidental.) At the store, if I see something that my children would actually enjoy eating, it’s definitely not going in the cart. You see, spending four dollars on a box of crackers is only worth it if I know that four dollars will be spread out over, say, four weeks. Then I’ve really gotten a good deal. So it’s salt-free Triscuits for us, thank you very much.

Some people overcome the dilemma of food disappearing too fast by shopping in bulk at places like Costco, Sam’s Club or other buildings larger than the Taj Majal. For me, this is also problematic. Sure the per item price is lower than at regular grocery stores, but it’s really hard to take comfort in that fact when I’ve just spent $39.50 on noodles. . . never mind that I won’t have to buy them again this decade. I don’t have room to refrigerate the five-gallon jug of meat marinade “once opened.” The 800-pack of flavored oatmeal might have a chance if it doubles as furniture, but my freezer would almost certainly be overtaxed by the industrial sized bucket of fish sticks. And if, by some odd culinary coincidence, I happened to need noodles, meat marinade, oatmeal and fish sticks all at once, I would push my way through the gale force fan gusts at the exit with only four items on my flatbed cart, but with the better part of $150 missing from my wallet. No thanks.

Well, despite the rift in our friendship, my colleague and I still occasionally spend our lunch hour together—she with her whole grain couscous, organic peanut butter (a.k.a. oil floating on beige sludge) and green tea, I with my humongous grapes, bland Triscuits and double stuff oreo shake from next door. I don’t tell her how tempted I am to spike her tea with lemon-flavored drink mix. Truth be told, I think she misses her old ways.

“How’s that shake?” she asks, failing to hide her longing.

My answer? “Orgasmic,” of course.