Organics Gone Wild

Um, I should probably refrain from writing about this until the shock wears off, but I just can't wait. Thanks to one of my trusty food-nerd listervs, I just discovered this new "food," if I can use the term loosely. Batter Blaster is a spray can of pancake/waffle batter. It's like CoolWhip or spray cheese that you squirt directly onto the skillet and cook like a pancake.

This alone is worthy of comment. The ad talks about how labourious it is to mix up milk, eggs, and flour to make pancake batter for one's children. (I've never timed myself doing it, but I think that process takes about 3 minutes.) I am of the old school mindset that pancake mix was a ridiculous thing; is it really so hard to mix 3 ingredients, or so much easier to "just add water"? Especially if one is concerned about providing a wholesome breakfast for the family, as the Batter Blaster ad says.

It's really worth the time to watch the demo video from the website. It shows a miserable child pouting while waiting (apparently for aeons) while her mother mixes up pancakes. This raises a few points in my mind. First, it doesn't take long to mix pancake batter. More importantly, while is the child sitting miserably while her mother does it? Why isn't she helping, and learning how real food works and how to make it? Children take great pleasure in mixing up goopy things and can learn a lot from doing it. This child, who will be an adult one day, may never know what pancakes really are: flour and eggs and milk. What will she do when oil and commodity prices go so high that it's no longer economical to process the hell out of everything and we have to go back to [gasp!] actually cooking? I suppose we can only hope that she is wealthy enough to hire an immigrant cook, displaced from her own country by the impacts of climate change on food production.

Cultural trends in cooking skills aside, what really got my attention about Batter Blaster is the fact that it is USDA certified organic. That's right. Organic. You know, that movement started by a bunch of hippies interested in getting in touch with the land, stepping outside the corporate system, living sustainably, and eating wholesome food. What has happened to a regulatory system that will certify spraycan pancakes as organic?

I will admit, the ingredient list isn't as bad as I expected, nor as frightening as some other foods found in spray cans. Still, aside from the flour and cane sugar (I'm amazed it's not corn syrup!), all of the ingredients are chemicals derived from commodity crops. They are not in fact actual foods and never were. The crop varieties used to produce these constituents ('ingredient' seems too generous a term here) are not actually edible in their raw form, yet their descriptions on the label make them seem fairly innocuous. It's what goes on between the farm and the spray can than nobody knows anything about, and that's the part that really scares me.

Batter Blaster Ingredients:
Filtered water; Organic wheat flour (unbleached); Organic cane sugar; Organic whole egg solids; Organic soybean powder; Sodium lactate (lactic acid from beet sugar); DiCalcium phosphate and Sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) (leavening agents); Organic rice bran extract propellant

Part of me wonders if this is all real, or just a fabulous joke. I sincerely hope it's a hoax, but I'm not that confident. I think it is a frightening commentary on our culture that we put so little value on the time it takes to prepare a meal. I refuse to accept that spending 5 minutes — or 3 hours — cooking food is a waste of my time. It's creative and nurturing to feed people, and by putting a little time and effort into it we can hopefully find our meals fulfilling, rather than simply filling.