Saturday, October 04, 2008

Nuts!

As usual, i miei prodi, I am confused and need your help.
I love hazel nuts.
Indeed, I have a hazel nut tree in my garden, but the squirrels get to the nuts before I do.
So I buy my hazel nuts in my local supermarket.
So far, so good.
They offer two hazel nut products, identical to the human eye and taste buds. One is just Hazel Nuts; the other is ORGANIC Hazel Nuts. There is a substantial price difference.
My confusion is this: how can a hazel nut be anything but organic?
Does it mean that if I buy the other kind, they have been manufactured out of some heavily-disguised variant of polyvinylchloride?
The cheaper ones taste good to me, so why should I pay the extra? I am genuinely interested in an answer.

3 comments:

Mary Strachan Scriver said...

COME on, Jake! They're like genuine imitation pearls! "Organic" foods have to meet certain negotiated standards about what ghastly carcinogenic substances have been put on them. Not certified "safe" necessarily, but at least free of the more obvious pesticides, herbicides and etc. "Organic" is code for "well, we're TRYing!"

Prairie Mary

Jake Allsop said...

Mary, "I yield to that soft impeachment", as Sid Perelman used to say. You are right, it's the gesture that matters, because I honestly can't find any actual differences, except that the organic nuts tend to be have kinkier shapes.

Mary Strachan Scriver said...

Send 'em to a proper lab and see what differences THEY can find! Certain malevolent molecules no doubt and probably they would kill rats in large enough quantities. Though, I think you and I are both at an age where the medical authorities say that the dangers of testing US are greater than the dangers of eating organic nuts.

I was pleased to read that I'm past the age where regular colonoscopies are indicated. Now I'm free to die as I please.

Prairie Mary