All this jury blogging has got me missing the good old days of food blogging in general and hating on the organic industrial complex, specifically (and also made me forget to celebrate our 300th post by linking to something that had to do with that movie 300. Oh well).

So as it is just before lunch time, let us return for a brief moment to one of the original directives of this blog (just take a gander at our tagline, if you don’t believe me) and visit a couple food related items of interest:

First, the fine folks at Consumerist have compiled a handy chart to help you with your fast food/chain restaurant choices if you’re interested in finding out useful information about nutritional value of the various items on their menu. For example, you can find out that there are waaaaay too many calories in a Chipotle Carnitas Burrito with rice, black beans, cheese, guacamole, and salsa (but if you’ve ever had one, you’d also know that they are still waaaay too good to say no to).

They also out the restaurants like In-n-Out, Olive Garden, and Applebee’s that do not post nutritional information on their website. Apparently, “eating good in the neighborhood” either means eating ignorant or Tyler Florence’s recipes are far too secret for your pedestrian eyes.

I was surprised to learn that discounting the quality of the “meat,” the Big Mac and the Filet o’Fish, two of the best major fast food chain sandwiches ever invented, are not as bad for you as you’d think. Of course when you add a large fries, large coke, and a chocolate triple thick, you enter “the all of your daily recommended calorie alotment in one meal” territory.

If that’s not enough for you, here’s a great article from Salon (subcription required or get a Day Pass by sitting through a short commercial - talk about a value meal) about how those boxes of Annie’s mac and cheese that you no doubt stock in your pantry is actually not much different from the stuff sold in Kraft’s ubiquitious blue box.

Annie, as it turns out, is not only a health conscious, farm-living hippie, yoga-doing, mom and cottage industry entreprenuer, but also a marketing genius who is “protecting” you and your children’s mind-body well being through the evil arts of repackaging and labeling.

Okay, so Annie’s cuts a few of Kraft’s chemicals, which is a good thing, but “totally natural”? Come now. We all know that that doesn’t hold a whole lot of water in food labeling. By labeling standards, poop could be considered “all natural.” It doesn’t mean I want to eat it.

And check out the website, with its faux homebrew web design stylings - the informal font treatment, wonky callout boxes, and clipart style graphics - certainly don’t call to mind a $34 million a year product line.

The author, Anastacia Marx de Salcedo, further sharpens her aim on the entire convenience food industry and the busy parents who unwittingly support it by choosing branded boxed food:

Annie’s Homegrown out-bads McDonald’s and Coca-Cola because it plants a corporate beachhead right there in your family’s kitchen. Every time you reach for the rabbit, you’re delivering the message that the almighty brand trumps Mom or Dad’s efforts any day of the week. So, stand up, please, and receive a heartfelt thank-you from the American food industry. Where would they be without the culinary passivity and anesthetized palate you are so assiduously cultivating in the next generation? (emph. mine)

Word. There ain’t no Annie’s in our pantry.

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