When I was a kid, I thought canned food was a treat—better than candy! My mom (a recent immigrant from the Philippines) frowned upon any unfamiliar food, so the canned food section of our local grocery store was off-limits to my two sisters and me. Sometimes, during a trip to the store (if the three of us were able to negotiate a truce during our petty adolescent spats), two of us would keep mom occupied while one of us spent a few blissful moments in the canned-food isle. And that’s how I discovered Dinty Moore beef stew.
It was during one of these Mission Impossible moments that I managed to slip a can of Dinty Moore beef stew into our shopping cart, getting it past the cashier, into a brown bag—and into our house. I hid my treasured can behind a fifty-pound bag of rice. The next day after school, while my parents were still at work, I proudly showed my sisters what I had smuggled into our house, and we ate our first meal of processed food. Ah, how we marveled at the exotic gelatinous texture and excessive salt! Our tongues hurt for hours afterwards, but we all agreed it was worth it.
Flash forward: I am a mom of two small children, and I find myself doing the same thing my own mother did—banning canned food from our home. But I do it for a different reason. I know that I will have absolutely no control over what my kids eat when they’re older, so right now it’s my mission to get them to eat real food. Accordingly, we don’t eat canned food and we shop organic.
Banning canned foods is easy, but buying organic is a huge ordeal. My guru in the world of all things organic was the wife of a butcher. An acquaintance from my first fresh-out-of-college job, we were re-introduced to each other years later, by a mutual friend who realized that we lived near each other. When we met for dinner one night, she brought her own water and grilled the waiter—on the ingredients in everything on the menu. The butcher’s wife, it seemed, was a person requiring high maintenance; but somehow I didn’t find her interrogation the least bit annoying. It was extremely entertaining instead, like watching a scene from Law & Order. I couldn’t look away and secretly enjoyed it. After the exhausted waiter left with our order, before taking a sip from her bottle of water, the butcher’s wife told me she didn’t think the waiter was a very good one, and she wasn’t sure the restaurant’s ingredients were either fresh or organic. “Organic” ingredients? I’d never heard about anything like that at any restaurant I’d ever been to, so my ears perked up.
“What’s ‘organic’?” I asked. She looked shocked when she heard these words, and braced herself, as if the only thing keeping her from falling off her chair was holding onto the table for dear life. But I guess she took pity on me (I was five months pregnant at the time) and she tried to maintain her composure. Patiently, she explained what “organic” meant, pointed me in the direction of the nearest natural food market, and strongly suggested that I start buying all my meat and poultry from her husband.
I was confused at first. I mean, who wouldn’t be? There’re so many different labels on foods, like, “Made with Organic Ingredients,” “Certified Organic,” “100% Organic,” “All-Natural,” “Free-Range,” and “Antibiotic-Free.” I’ve seen organic certifications by the USDA and by Quality Assurance International (QAI). And I’ve read about “meeting standards in accordance with the California Organic Foods Act of 1990.”
When I began buying organic produce, the only place where I could find the stuff was a specialty natural food market called Perelandra in Brooklyn Heights. Then, green markets started popping up all over the five boroughs of New York City. I equated fresh produce with organic produce, and I made sure that I carried an empty knapsack with me on the days that a green market was open near my office or home. Within the last year or so, Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s have changed the grocery landscape in my neighborhood, offering the specialty shops stiff competition, with lower pricing supported by a larger volume of organic products. And now organic products are being peddled by chain grocery stores across the country, like the Nature’s Promise line of organic food by Stop & Shop!
