Blue is for low sodium, yellow for organic, red is heart-healthy, green is, of course, natural, purple is for healthy kids, beige is gluten-free and orange is low sugar. Unless you're colorblind, it’s shopping like paint-by-numbers. Maybe you need to recognize the actual product, like canned corn vs. peas, but you don’t need to be concerned about your cholesterol or calorie intake, artificial additives or loading your arteries with salt.

It’s called "wellness information," and it’s touted as an easy way to make healthier selections.

When I was in elementary school, my mother defrosted hamburgers on a windowsill in full sunlight on very hot days. A diabetic, she spent more than 70 years of her life using saccharine, which was eventually deemed a killer artificial sweetener, way before the advent of  Equal and Splenda. She carefully selected our canned goods, which in those days only listed ingredients and the manufacturer. There were no expiration dates, no explanations of the minimum daily requirement a serving provided and no chemical content details.

In the summer when local vegetable gardens yielded naturally healthy crops, we smothered our fresh corn with butter and salt. Later we were introduced to margarine, which even later became an option  with a far bigger potential  for trouble for our digestive systems. It was way worse  than the high-fat butter we had abandoned.

Trans-fatty acids were a mere dream in a budding nutritionist’s mind as we adjusted to changes in what had become preferred bread spreads.

For breakfast, before homogenized milk, there was cream to pour off the top of an unshaken bottle. It was a luxury to use it in your coffee or on your cereal. To our credit, however, most people did manage to squeeze oranges long before frozen juice appeared on the market, followed by cartons of O.J. that didn’t need squeezing or diluting in a pitcher.

I never knew what gluten was until many years later. And when I first heard of it, I thought it was a reference to someone who eats either too much or too quickly.

Today I shop "wisely," aware of  calories, artificial additives and "consume by" dates imprinted on my purchases. But I wonder just how much I’m influencing my life span by being alert to shelf tags and all of these advisories. I remember eating unwashed cucumbers and tomatoes standing in my dad’s garden, never thinking about the manure that had enriched the soil or the insects and bugs that may have crawled over them in the fields. 

It was a very different time, indeed.

And by the way, in spite of raw chopped meat defrosting in the broiling sun and her saccharine intake, my mother lived into her 90s.

Go figure.