g-Think | Issue 16 | Are You Gonna Eat That?

I’m not sure who moved my cheese, but I’m pretty sure it’s gone. Remember those 16-slice packs of Kraft American singles, unnecessarily wrapped to death in sheets of glossy plastic? Remember brands like Velveeta and Easy Cheese? These products were relatively ubiquitous, circa 1985. I envied kids whose moms lovingly filled their lunchboxes with “spray cheese”, Keebler Club crackers, a bologna sandwich and, of course, the pièce de résistance: Oreos. My own mother was seemingly freakish, doling out tuna salad on grainy bread, green grapes that would invariably become too warm and flaccid to enjoy and, if I was really lucky, a Nilla Wafer or two. My mom and her fellow Bread & Circus cronies aside, back then ignorance was bliss; the majority cheese-spraying population unsuspectingly doused their crackers with carcinogens with no inkling of the terrifying truth.

Fast forward twenty years or so and Easy Cheese has become nothing less than a bad dream, a haunting testament to 1980s flamboyance, recklessness and plasticity—not to mention a culture of mass production and consumer misinformation. The food landscape has changed, and along with it has come a new set of vernacular; terms such as non-GMO, rBGH, grass-fed, biodynamic, antibiotic-free and farm-raised adorn this new wave of products and jump out from the cluttered shelves, making the older products look, well, old.

In case you’ve been too busy reading labels to notice, the dairy aisle has become a virtual free-for-all, with so many images of green grass and happy cows that you’d almost think these animals actually like being milked. And hey, thanks to the kind souls at Niman Ranch, we don’t have to be afraid of hot dogs anymore, as their Fearless Franks—a product so desirable and so marketable that restaurants will actually list the brand name on their menu—not only feature grass-fed beef but also flaunt no nitrates.

In 2006, U.S. sales of organic food totaled nearly $17 billion, a 22% increase from 2005 (based on preliminary results of Organic Trade Association 2007 Manufacturers Survey). Impressively, organic baby food has seen almost identical growth—a sales spike of 21% last year—while the overall baby food category increased only 3%. It’s not surprising that Awakening Consumer behavior tends to mirror this trend, as a recent g-Think survey indicates that 64% of Awakening Consumers purchase organic milk either “occasionally” or “all the time.”

So what’s fueling the proliferation of the organic industry? There’s certainly no question that the increased transparency and accessibility of information are at hand here, but something about it feels more primal than that. Are we more aware? Absolutely. Are we paranoid? Probably. Are we scared? I think so.

Regardless of what the answer is, it’s nice to be able to put aerosol cans full of orange cheese behind us. Can you smell the farmhouse gruyere?