In northern Minnesota, of all places, gluten-free food is abundant and available.
On a recent trip through Minnesota, my wife, daughter and I stopped at a bakery and coffee shop in Grand Rapids. Ahead of us, in line at the counter, was a thin but athletic-looking man and his family.
The wait was longer than usual at a coffee shop because the man was interrogating the teenage server about gluten-free offerings. He asked her about the ingredients used to make scones, cookies and other goodies because, as he repeated several times, no one in his family eats gluten. The words came out of his mouth in an acerbic tone, as if feeding kids gluten is the moral equivalent of removing your eight-year-old from school and sending him to work in an asbestos mine.
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While that scene was never duplicated on our trip through Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, the marketing claims around food are much more aggressive in the United States.
In nearly every grocery store, in cities and small towns, claims of sustainable, natural, fair trade, non-GMO and probiotic were plastered on everything from oranges to oregano.
My wife’s favourite was a claim of gluten-free apple juice at a store in Michigan.
John Reganold, a soil scientist and agro-ecology expert at Washington State University, said demand for healthier food and food perceived as healthier will only increase in North America.
He said there are two parallel trends in the food industry.
One is driven by people seeking higher quality food. They are driving the boom in local, sustainable agriculture and buying any book that condemns Monsanto.
Reganold said the other group is consuming cheap calories, or low quality junk food, because they don’t have the time or money to buy sustainably sourced salmon from their local fishmonger.
The side-by-side trends are creating a polarized market for food, which offers an opportunity for savvy farmers and marketers, but an impossible scenario for regulators and politicians who must craft agricultural policies to accommodate the extremes.
Nuance and middle ground, apparently, are dead. Welcome to the new order: organic quinoa and CBC alongside Cool Ranch Doritos and Fox News.
