Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Vitamin Water sucks.
Don’t get me wrong: There’s a lot to love about Vitamin Water. It tastes relatively good, especially for something termed “water,” which really should not taste like anything at all. It is brightly colored, which allows it be elevated to the level of fashion accessory.
On the downside, it exemplifies everything wrong with food in America.
KANSAN
Vitamin Water, the popular water-replacement, contains fewer actual vitamins that many are led to believe.
Now Americans want two things from what they eat: nutrition and convenience.
We want it to be high in vitamins, protein, calcium or whatever nutrient is currently in vogue. We want it to be low in calories, even lower in fat, and we don’t care what we have to substitute to get it there. And we want it to come with microwave instructions.
Convenience may work in some instances, but it’s clearly not cutting it in the realm of food. Paying faux-attention to nutrition in a gullible “if it says it’s fortified with vitamin X it must be good!” sort of way is clearly not working in a nation populated with weight obsessed, vitamin-popping fad-environmentalists with health problems too numerous to list.
Which is what makes Vitamin Water so damn great. It takes two health buzz words that any person who knows a single thing about health (and only a single thing about health) cannot argue with, puts them together, and suddenly you have a product that is seemingly incredibly beneficial and guilt free. And convenient!
Vitamin Water is the icon of blind religious fanaticism for easy nutrition. Thou shalt not take into consideration how foods interact with each other when digested. Thou shalt ignore the empty calories on the backs of which these vitamins ride. Thou shall replace real food with things that are colorful and come in packages with witty sales pitches on the label.
When I go to the grocery store, I don’t need my food to make me laugh. I guess that’s why I’m not the target demographic for “Grapples,” grape juice-infused apples.
Food has gotten so messed up it’s no wonder we need health gurus to point us the way through the processed, over-sweetened, hydrogenated, whole grain, fortified, dyed, infused wasteland that is every grocery store across the country.
Back in the day, you could read ingredients and understand what everything was. But then again, back in the day we cooked with lard. Ironically, though, we weren’t lard-asses. Makes you wonder what we’re doing wrong.
Americans should pay actual attention to what they’re ingesting, which is what this column is for: reiterating food lessons.
The goal of this series is to make sense of what should be a no-nonsense subject: food and eating. If all goes well, as you bite into your next value meal, you’ll have a slight twinge of fear that you’re destroying all that used to be good and holy and above all, simple.
— —McConnell is a Dallas junior in English.
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Comments
McConnell: Consuming weapons of mass construction
I hope this isn't seen as an attack on her character, but I know for a fact that Ms. McConnell has been an avid drinker of Vitamin Water as recently as this summer! Perhaps she realized her folly?
Great column, though.
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