Shopping Carts in Ravines

I’ve ridiculed the recent product trend of “fruit-flavoured vitamin-enhanced bottled water” in the past by saying “Yeah, we had that when I was a kid, WE CALLED IT JUICE!” (I’m not the only one) but regardless and against my better judgment (or rather, thirsty and dealing with York U’s painful Pepsi contract beverage selections) I bought a bottle of Aquafina Plus+ Pomegranate Cherry.

While drinking it, I found it had a weird aftertaste as though it contained aspartame. It didn’t, but while reading the ingredients “cochineal” caught my eye. I looked it up in this animal ingredients list when I got home, feeling suspicious, and my suspicions were confirmed:

Carmine. Cochineal. Carminic Acid.

Red pigment from the crushed female cochineal insect. It takes a million corpses to make a kilogram of carminic acid, the more purified form of cochineal extract. Used in cosmetics, shampoos, red apple sauce, and other foods (including red lollipops and food coloring). May cause allergic reaction. Alternatives: beet juice (used in powders, rouges, and shampoos; no known toxicity) and alkanet root (from the root of an herb-like tree; used as a red dye for inks, wines, lip balms, etc.; no known toxicity; can also be combined to make a copper or blue coloring).

Aquafina has no interest in explaining what cochineal is, means or does, not on the bottle and certainly not on the website. The website, instead of having proper nutritional information, has a Flash site with a little marching band that comes out to congratulate you on your brilliant choice of bug juice and the accompanying text lists a few vitamins and then tells you to give yourself a standing ovation.

If you still really want to buy this product and want a bug-free and better-made alternative, I’d recommend Glaceau’s VitaminWater which I drank quite a bit of while working at the Pemberton Festival (and getting free drinks). It uses vegetable juice for colour. I doubt I’ll be buying all that much of it, though - I can water down my juice myself thankyouverymuch.

Alright, so, after that bug juice incident, I convinced myself nothing that gross would happen to my food again.

I was wrong. Team Coke managed to beat Pepsi’s bug juice with a new addition to the Minute Maid Fruit Solutions line.

I was standing in a gas station convenience store, searching through the drink fridges trying to find a bottle of anything that looked like it might be a beverage intended for human consumption. I was considering giving up, but decided to go for an overpriced and undersized bottle of a Mango Orange Passionfruit juice made from concentrate.

I didn’t think to read the ingredients on a bottle of mango juice, even though I checked what was in the chips I bought at the same time.

The chips were terrible. The juice was also terrible and had a weird aftertaste and seemed to leave my tongue feeling sort of weird. I read the empty bottle while waiting for my bus to show up, and…

Minute Maid Fruit Solutions Omega-3 Mango Orange Passion ingredients:
Fruit juices from concentrate (orange, grape and passionfruit), mango puree, natural flavour, encapsulated fish oil (refined fish oil (anchovy, sardine), fish gelatin, sodium phosphate, sodium ascorbate, canola and sunflower oils, natural flavour, soy tocopherols, citric acid), potassium citrate (potassium), ascorbic acid (vitamin C), ferric pyrophosphate (iron), hydrolyzed soy lecithin, folic acid (folate), thiamine mononitrate (thiamine)

I’m not sure what televised robot parents these juice manufacturers were raised by, but those robots obviously did a poor job because any four year old can tell you that the only ingredients needed to make juice are the first four listed there - orange, grape, passionfruit and mango juice. Sardines?? *BZZZZZZZ!* Wrong answer!

The Minute Maid bottle loudly and visibly proclaims that it is “made with 100% juice*”, a claim which is so deceptive it ought to be illegal when compared to the actual ingredients list. (*The asterisk only has a footenote saying that the juices are a blend from concentrates.)

However, their website is at least pretty upfront about the source of Omega-3 in the drink:

“Using innovative encapsulated fish oil as its Omega-3 source, … Minute Maid® Fruit Solutions® Omega-3 Mango Orange Passion contains ingredients derived from fish sources. While these fish sources have been highly refined, for precautionary reasons, individuals that are allergic to fish should not consume this product.”

I’m not sure why adding gelatin capsules (which dissolve) to the fish oil qualifies as “innovative.” And beyond the anchovy oil, sardine oil and fish gelatin included in their “100% juice”, there’s one final animal additive… cochineal. (They mention that it’s for colour, but that’s about it.)

Unfortunately, this is actually a fair indication of how common these crushed bugs are when it comes to the shockingly bright red colour of many contemporary synthetic artifoods. While I certainly won’t be buying either of these products and would advise people against it, these specific products are just two examples of what’s wrong with the food most people eat today - even the “good” processed food items like these that people are told they actually have to struggle to find the will power to choose!

Choosing to ingest things like crushed bugs in place of food on the basis that they’re technically edible isn’t anything to pat yourself on the back about. Listen to your body and your planet (AND YOUR DOCTOR!) for information on what you should be eating, not television sets or billboard advertisements.

And read ingredient labels, trust me, because it’s like the freakin’ Wild West when it comes to this stuff.

I had two ideas for books to write. 

Then I read this book, and only had one idea left. 

I strongly encourage you to get a copy and absorb it. 

(I bought it at a York U textbook store…
I really should’ve noted what course it was for!)

From the book Wholeness by Alex Gerber Jr.

DISCONNECTION

Reductionist, overspecialized education, information overload, and a host of other social, psychological, and economic factors have led to a society that is disconnected from wholeness.

Bombarded on all sides by “communication,” real connection that is fundamentally honest, open and forthright is hard to find.
Disconnectedness is exacerbated by the mass media, especially television and movies, which feature endless themes of violence, greed, murder, manipulation, deception, and domination. The fact that such behaviour exists in “real life” is no excuse for its relentless reinforcement.

At the same time, our desires for connection, certainty, and fulfillment are constantly stimulated by advertisements that combine state-of-the-art consumer psychology with sophisticated and seductive production techniques.

This disconnectedness has enormous social and psychological consequences. The philosopher Ivan Illich expressed the situation well: “So pervasive is the power of the institutions we have created that they shape not only our preferences, but actually our sense of possibilities.”

The theoretical physicist David Bohm (1917 - 1992) suggested an alternative:

Man’s general way of thinking of the totality, i.e., his general world view, is crucial for overall order of the human mind itself.
If he thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, than that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken and without border (for every border is a division or break) then his mind will tend to mind in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole.

…

Many people sense a void in their lives, an absence of purpose or meaning. Education, counseling, and meditation (for example) can address this situation. As people learn about wholeness and experience it directly, personal transformation occurs. A psychological/spiritual window opens and purpose appears or is rekindled.

As one group of students at an alternative high school learned about the holistic options that already exist for humanity’s success, in one hour their collective attitude transformed from lethargy, apathy, and cynicism to excitement, relief, and hope for the future.

Although hopelessness seems to engulf many people today, this outlook can change very quickly.

The energies associated with the direct experience of wholeness are transformative.

Well, after a half-year offline, I finally got this blog back up and running.

This is just a quick post to say that. Much back & forward content to come.