Where Does It Come From?

This is the great question: where does the food we eat come from?

This is the debate: does it matter?

My last post on Subway's mystery source of their products stirred quite an uproar. Some people commented confirming their utmost disgust with Subway, others shouted that it simply doesn't matter where the meat comes from.

As a society we crave information. We want to know as much as possible about where we visit, what we eat and what's happening in news and pop culture.

In the past 10+ years our "tastes" have also changed with our desire for "information". Suddenly the facts we knew about food before just aren't enough. We want to know the source of the product....how was it made? Where did it come from? Were animals abused? Are the ingredients "natural"?

Many of you might say it doesn't matter where the food comes from, "I just want it to taste good." To a certain extent, I completely agree. It doesn't matter where the chocolate chips came from for my chocolate chip cookie - I just want it to taste amazing.

However, at the same time there seems to be a trend in restaurants taking more responsibility for product offering.

-Chipotle built an entire company on one single compelling idea: Naturally Raised Meat
-Pizza Hut jumped on board with the new Natural Pizza: all natural meat, sauce from organic tomatoes, all natural cheese. (What does "natural" mean?)
-McDonald's recently launched a campaign to create awareness of their quality products, claiming their burgers are made from 100% Real Beef
-Wendy's promoted their "Fresh, Never Frozen" Burgers for months last year.
-Panera uses "all natural eggs" for their breakfast sandwiches.

These are only a handful of restaurants that have made claims about where their food comes from and how they are "high quality."

So what does this all mean? Clearly there are people out there who only eat food when they know where it comes from. There are hundreds of others who don't care and will eat Twinkies until the day they die.

The reality of it is, we don't know. We never will. We don't have a choice except to believe the "stories" that restaurant companies tell us.

Starbucks coffee beans come from the great mountains of Latin America. Maybe? Oh is that why they charge so much?
Chipotle only uses 'naturally raised meat'. Does that mean that the cows only eat grass? Does it make it taste better?
McDonald's Chicken is 100% White Meat. You sure about that?

Unless you have flown to the mountains and watched the beans come back and get delivered to Starbucks, unless you have been on the farms that Chipotle gets their meat from, and unless you are apart of the process McDonald's uses when making their chicken nuggets.....you don't know anything.

We only have one choice - to believe or not to believe. I'm not saying that the stories that restaurants tell us about their food is a lie, I'm just saying we'll never know for sure.

But, the bigger question....without all of the restaurant claims of being natural, not frozen, and real beef.....would we still eat at the same places anyway?