"Farmer's Best"

Oooh this one really gets me. A company is making something shit and they want to package it so people don't realise that it's not exactly what they'd hope for. The product has some fatal flaw; the car will rust, the hairdryer is noisy, the thing is just plastic not metal. In order to disguise this critical fact, the marketeers just come up with a name which is the exact opposite of the problem. So the rusty car is called something like "enduro", the noisy hairdryer is called something like "silencio", the crap bit of weak plastic is called "girder". It's just a big bare-faced lie.

The biggest, rudest, boldest bare-faced lie at the moment is Dairy Farmers "Farmer's Best (TM)", er, drink. If you live in Australia you've seen it; it has a green label, it has healthy ticks on the front, and it's high in Omega-3. It's like, the top product, probably organic, right? It certainly looks like that - the other products have stereotypical blue labels; Farmer's Best (TM) has a deep green one. Friends of ours, when asked to bring some organic milk for our toddler, bought us Farmers Best (TM). It's the one at eye-level in the supermarket, so you know it's being heavily pushed by Dairy Farmers. It's soaking up that desire amongst consumers for the best milk we can get... but it's not milk as we know it.

If you look at the Dairy Farmers' website you can read all about Farmers Best (TM). Except, of course, the ingredients. Luckily I have a second bottle, lovingly bought in good intention by another visitor. Before I tell you the indgredients, let's first look at the ingredients of Dairy Farmers standard milk:

• Milk
  

Now let's look at the ingredients in Farmers Best (TM):

• Skim milk
• Concentrated skim milk
• Monounsaturated vegetable oil (may contain traces of soybean oil)
  
• Maltodextrin (derived from corn)
• Emulsifier (471)
• Vegetable gums (401, 412)
• Mineral salt (339)
• Long chain omega 3 fatty acids (derived from fish)
• Antioxidants (301, 306 (derived from soy))
• Flavour.

Now there's too many issues in there to even talk about all of them here. To me, this appears to be a "processed" food, and processed foods are processed because it's cheaper. Milk is relatively pricey, certainly compared to vegetable oils, soy products, maltodextrin and the fat scraped off the machines at the fish finger factory. And I'm guessing that the antioxidants aren't put in there because of the wonders of natural antioxidants in super foods such as blueberries and green tea, but because antioxidants are actually... preservatives. But antioxidants sounds better, eh? And to sum it all up, they stick in some flavour. Because this isn't the 'best' milk Dairy Farmers can produce for you to drink. The is the cheapest, bulked-up, longest-lasting mixture of industrial food products they could conjur up and still con people to pick it up off the shelves, thinking it's the good stuff, because it's green, it has three ticks on the front and OMEGA 3 in big letters. It's not even 'milk' by Dairy Farmers' own definition. And if you look at the label, actually, it doesn't even claim to be. But they know you'll fill in that blank for them, erroneously. It's a big, bare-faced deception.

The companies and individuals that provide food for us to eat have a moral obligation to be honest with us. They should not package up one thing in a deliberate attempt to make us assume it's a different, better, sort of thing. It's easy to confuse and mislead people; it takes a better person to avoid the gains that this trickery can bring. And in this case Dairy Farmers show that they are not that sort of person.