To define what foodiness is you have to start off by defining what foodiness™ comes from, which is food.


Food is anything edible that at one time walked, swam, or flew, or that grew out of the ground, and has not been tampered with at all.

If it walked, swam, flew or grew out of the ground but has been altered in some way, or if it came straight out of a manufacturing plant, then it’s foodiness.

In a nutshell foodiness™ can be defined as something edible that is presented as if it’s food, but which in fact isn’t completely and totally food – or at least the food it claims to be.

So, for instance, a strawberry grown in a garden that has not been altered in any way is food.

A strawberry “fruit” bar made with strawberry “flavoring” meant to taste like strawberries but without any actual fruit in it is foodiness™ because it seems like food, it tastes like food, it’s treated as if it’s food, but it isn’t actually food.


Why is it necessary to use a term like “foodiness™”? Because foodiness™ has highjacked the idea of what food is. Foodiness™ is presented — and accepted by most — as food. It’s a bit like Invasion of the Body Snatchers – it looks like food, it talks like food, but it’s actually an alien in a food look-alike body.

Over the last few decades foodiness™ has slowly and insidiously come to define what food is. As a result actual food has had to take on modifiers to distinguish itself from foodiness™.

The best example is the term, “whole food”. Unfortunately “whole food” doesn’t really make the distinction between food and foodiness™ clear enough. After all, if certain foods are “whole” then other foods must be “broken”. This doesn’t really explain it.

This is why the term “real food” is used here, because it more clearly calls out a distinction between real and fake, which is the real difference between food and foodiness™ after all.

The point of using the term “foodiness2” is to help to distinguish between food and everything else so we stop perceiving foodiness™ as food, and start seeing it for what it really is. …whatever that may be.


Take an apple.

There’s only one actual, real-deal apple off a tree with nothing added to it or that has not been altered in any way. But there’s an infinite variety of altered or ersatz “apples” on grocery store shelves. The spectrum runs from real apples that have been tampered with to make them easier to grow, sweeter to eat, shinier to look at, more convenient to consume, or appear to be in season when they are not, to products with very little or even no apples in them at all but which use the name “apple”, leaving the eater with merely the idea that they’ve consumed apples.

We should know the difference between food and foodiness™. There are many reasons why we often do not.

To begin with, foodiness™ products are not labeled as such. Foodiness™ is presented as if it’s food. …after all, nobody would buy products labeled, “out of season, flavorless strawberries covered in toxic pesticides flown from the other side of the world”; “blueberry muffins made with blue-tinted corn syrup dots with no blueberries in them”, or “hamburgers made with 1/3rd beef and 2/3rds industrial filler,” …at least nobody who wasn’t a Borg.

In addition, anyone under 50 grew up with foodiness™ disguised as food: it was in our baby food, our school lunches, our snacks, our frozen dinners. Only grandma’s green beans grown in her backyard were sacrosanct. Today, even grandma’s green beans have been genetically modified. At this point we’re all a bit like Charlton Heston in the 1969 film Soylent Green who didn’t know that the pellets he had eaten his whole life weren’t actually food because he’d never seen the real thing.

Of course, those pellets turned out to be made of people. Foodiness™ may not be made of people (yet). But the foodiness™ with very little food in it that we do consume — protein bars with no meat or beans in them, veggie puffs with no vegetables, completely artificial diet soda with “natural flavors” – shows that we’re not that far from a pellet driven diet after all. In certain ways the only real difference between soylent green and foodiness™ is better packaging.

Just like Heston’s character had to go to a Soylent Green plant to see for himself how the pellets were made to understand what he was really eating, it’s understanding what happens to an apple on its way to foodiness that reveals what foodiness really is.

So herewith The 6 Degrees of Foodiness™: An Apple From Start to Foodiness™ >>