15 July 2006

Honey'd?

I got a box of "Honey'd Raisin Bran" from the store the other day. A certified organic cereal from Naure's Path.
I didn't actually catch the "honey'd", but I got it more because of the cereal's high protein and fiber content, and low sugar content and only noticed the "honey'd" after the fact. Once I noticed that this raisin bran was "honey'd" raisin bran, I tried to detect the honey taste. Not tasting even the slightest bit of honey, I got suspicious and checked the ingredients.

Well no wonder. Honey is the very last ingredient. After sea salt, and I can barely taste the salt in this cereal.

In fact, I got curious and tried to figure out exactly how much honey is in this thing. There are a total of 7 servings of cereal, and each serving has 240 mg of sodium. So total sodium content is 1680 mg. Each 1/4 tsp of sea salt contains 440 mg. of salt. So 1680/440 is 3.8. That is 3.8 1/4 tsps of salt-- which amounts to less than a teaspoon of sea salt in the entire box of cereal. If honey is listed as an ingredient after sea salt, and we assume that ingredients are listed in weight order, and we furthermore grant that honey is denser than salt, then it should roughly follow that there is even less than "less than a teaspoon" of honey in this cereal.

These are rough estimates, so I'm not claiming accuracy, but I think I'm making reasonable conjectures. It's quite a grandiose claim to describe something as "honey'd", when there is less than a teaspoon of honey in the entire box--about 5.25 cups of cereal.

By this logic, they could put less than a teaspoon of raisins in this cereal and call it "raisin bran".

Wouldn't it be more accurate to call this cereal sea-salted raisin bran?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yes, it would be more accurate, but then they would even chase away the small following of fundamental organicists that they do have.