WorldFooood

    If somebody asked you to try cookies, in front of a dining center, at ten o'clock in the morning, would you take them? Surprisingly, a lot of people did. We presented them with two options, organic cookies and the regular processed Chips Ahoy. 18 out of the 25 people we asked actually volunteered to try the cookies. Most of them even liked the organic cookies, saying things like “they taste better” or “it tastes sweet and light”. Of course there were others who were not so apt on eating our organic product and made comments saying it was “chalky” and “doughy”. The Fillion study showed that the difference between organic foods and conventional food vary from product to product and these cookies support the argument for “organic not being a better substitute for conventional.” The interesting thing was that opinions on organic foods were mixed. Even people who did not like the organic cookies still stood for buying and using organic foods. Others, however, admitted they did not use organic foods due to economic factors which is totally understandable, as we are just broke college kids.The most interesting reaction was a newly hired Spanish professor who picked up the organic cookie and ate it, while say “Hmmmm this is organic” and ate the Chips Ahoy while saying “Hmmmm this is processed”. He was actually in my opinion, our best “test subject”.

    7 out of 25 people chose to walk away from the wonderful creation called cookies and 2 out of 25 people chose the organic over the non-organic cookie. Many of the people that chose to take the cookies favored the Chips Ahoy because of its taste and texture. People described the Chips Ahoy cookie as sweet, chocolatey, and “normal” (whatever that means). Others described the organic cookie as grainier, chalky, and chewy. The majority of people that took our cookie were young adults that probably attend VCU and professors that probably have enough money to buy whichever cookie their hearts desire. This information relates back to an article called, Consumer behavior and purchase intention for organic food. I found it shows that people that tend to buy organics are tend to be young adults or people that have stable jobs with an above average amount of income. My research also stated that organic foods do not always taste better and our reviews prove this.

     While reading an article entitled, “Attitudes towards organic foods and risk/benefit perception associated with pesticides”, I learned that organic foods are trusted more in mostly European countries. Their organic farms are more open to the public, so the people at least know and understand what they’re eating. But, in America, trying to find where your produce is from is like going on a needle in a haystack hunt. There’s so many twists and turns, the distributors and producers take you in so many different directions that it’s hard to tell where anything is coming from. This I feel correlates with the distrust of the foods we were giving out. Americans already don’t trust where their food is coming from, so why would they trust somebody randomly handing out food?

     One thing we discovered was that the labels on food are not always 100% accurate. The mislabeling of Pamela’s Products Organic Cookies lead us to give a vegan eggs, even though the box was labeled dairy free. This is because there is debate in the food industry today as to whether or not eggs are dairy. This caused us to take a closer look at a comparison of the ingredients in the two cookies. The organic cookie had 40 more calories, 2 more grams of fat though the Chips Ahoy had more saturated fat, and 25 more grams of sodium than the Chips Ahoy. Further inspection of the ingredients led us to discover that the organic cookies contained, again, marked “dairy free” were made with chocolate chips that may contain milk protein. The organic cookies also contained Xanthan Gum which is used as a stabilizer and thickener in food made from fermenting sucrose, glucose, or lactose which has received some skepticism from the health community.