Terry D. Etherton

Recently, I was in upstate New York and drove by a farm that had a sign out front at the end of the lane that read “Natural Eggs for Sale”.   The sign was appropriate for the message since the wood used for the sign looked to be about 50 years old.  My first inclination was to pull into the lane and see if they had any other “types” of eggs for sale especially since “natural” eggs are so common!  However, I didn’t do that.

As I was driving down the road, I kept wondering why the word natural is used so much in food marketing, especially when it conveys (at least to me) so little.  We are awash in foods that are marketed that boldly proclaim they are naturally produced.  I would venture a guess that virtually all foods sold in the grocery store, whether processed or not, start from real, “natural” foods!

In the spirit of running an experiment, I thought I would start a discussion with some New York relatives (urban dwellers) about their view of natural foods.  That quickly got out of hand!  Some shared the responses I have gotten before about “natural” being better…you know, better than that factory farmed “stuff”!  I was aghast since I thought over the years that I had done a pretty job with this group of “teaching” them about all the misleading food labels used in marketing.  So much for my experiment.

This marketing silliness has even pervaded parts of Texas.  Over Thanksgiving, I was in rural Texas (about 80 miles northwest of Houston) to visit some relatives.  I saw all sorts of food marketing signs that touted the virtues of natural food, grass-feed beef and other descriptors I have written about previously (please see “Verbal Engineering” – How to Mislead Consumers about Biotechnology“)

By the way, if anyone has a source for eggs that are produced “un-naturally”, can you please let me know?  I would like to talk with the farmer to learn how they do this.  It might be that they are using some new technology that I should learn about?