While I consider myself to be a healthful eater who makes careful choices in the supermarket, I've found it particularly bewildering to engage with Whole Foods' ever-expanding set of ratings and color-coded symbols. They are used to label myriad items from meat to greens to lotion. Several of them use a system that most citizens are already familiar with and can pretty much understand without even reading the explanation- green is great, yellow is okay, red is bad.
Arguably the most straightforward guide is the ANDI scale, which stands for Aggregate Nutrient Density Index. It is helpful to know that collard greens are the most nutrient dense food you can eat, but let's not forget about the fact that a varied, balanced diet is also good for us, we can't eat only "top 10" foods, and that many vitamins are fat-soluble and need that olive oil on them in order to be absorbed by the body. Using these labels as a shorthand substitute for reading the package can be convenient, the ANDI scale is "part of this whole process, not an isolated tool," says Mary Olivar, Whole Foods' Southwest regional healthy eating specialist. I think this coded system is extremely seductive for shoppers who want to make the best choices all the time, as quickly as possible, without having to worry or research themselves to death. I imagine that the symbols themselves will begin (have begun?) to generate a whole new set of hang-ups, such as "Should I buy the Orange-rated shampoo for my kids because they're sold out of my favorite Green-rated brand? Am I a worse mother because of it?" The rating is essentially subjective. It could be argued that were someone to produce an entirely different scale for animal welfare, for example, what is a 3 on that scale might be a 5 according to Whole Foods.
I don't want to sound like I don't support organic, local, sustainable, or otherwise "clean" food. In fact I am a huge supporter. It's just that I'm a little wary of the oversimplification, judging, and jumping to conclusions that is probably taking place. In the end, people should fully own all of their knowledge, and that means reading ingredients, learning about production practices, nutrition, and drawing their own conclusions.
This past Earth Day, Whole Foods celebrated by discontinuing the sale of all Red and Unrated seafood items, nearly a year earlier than they had planned.
Because the ANDI scores are based on nutrition-per-calorie, high-calorie foods that are very good for you (yogurt, peanut butter, olive oil, avocado) get pushed lower down on the list, which may give people the sense that they should avoid them. The "Clean 15" list is not in Whole Foods, but I think it makes for an interesting side-by-side comparison.
