Sometimes I regard the natural foods section with the same curiosity as looking at a carnival sideshow rather than grocery shopping. Extra firm tofu noodles? Kefir? Tofurky bratwursts? People eat those things? You don't say!

When I was growing up, my parents went through an insane whole and natural foods kick, the kind where we didn't have white flour for two years. Not a long amount of time, certainly, but akin to a jail sentence when those two years encompass the prime slumber party and pizza-eating time of your childhood. Now wheat grass and alfalfa sprouts are everywhere, but in the early '80s, there were a lot of quizzical looks and confused 4th graders trying to choose between bulgur cookies and carob brownies for an after-school snack. My mother used to have tirades about Wonder Bread, telling us that it was fake food and that we might as well just eat some plastic because it would be just as bad for our digestive systems. Some parents worry about their kids taking drugs. Mine worried that my sister and I would get our hands on some refined sugar. I used to spend my allowance on Ding Dongs, because damn...even the chocolate-y coating isn't really chocolate. Delicious plastic fake food.

As a result, in the back of my mind "organic" became synonymous with "tastes like ass" or "you dirty hippie." When I went off to college, I would gleefully eat canned Chef Boyardee products and over-processed empty calories and feel as though I were eating like a queen. Or eating the way the rest of my generation did, the generation who didn't have to worry about going home from school to find that their house had been turned into a temporary Greenpeace headquarters or know that their calls home were possibly being recorded by the FBI. Plus, the great thing about garbage food was that it was cheap: Five cans of SpaghettiOs cost the same as a head of lettuce.

It's hard to believe, but we've only been relying upon highly processed fake foods like TV dinners for about 60 years. Along with this cultural shift, the country has been loosening its collective belt along the way, as the incidence of obesity has skyrocketed. For instance, Coca-Cola has been making sugary soda for over a hundred years, but it wasn't until the mid-1950s that soda moved from being a treat to something that one might have every day. And we can all think of people who have at least two sodas a day or more, diet soda or not.

One reason behind this shift may be a simple case of economics. Check out this damage:

...the current farm bill helps commodity farmers by cutting them a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather than, say, by supporting prices and limiting production, as farm bills once did. The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

Holy crap! No wonder Twinkies are so cheap. It's a conspiracy! Not only has it become easier to get fatter, it's way cheaper!

Apparently my crazy bulgar-loving parents were right...fake food really isn't something we can trust. Maybe the natural foods section at the grocery store isn't that scary after all.

And with that, I have realized every woman's worst fear: I have just turned into my mother. At least I'm in good company.--Weetabix