Nuts!

As of fall 2007 truly raw almonds will no longer be available in the US or Canada, because the USDA, FDA, and the California Almond Board has released a marketing order that all almonds be pasteurized. This is due to two recent salmonella outbreaks, the cause of which, in Homegrown Revolution‘s opinion, is the usual poor factory farming practices. But it gets worse, according to the folks at the Weston A. Price foundation,

There is an even bigger issue. The FDA has decided not to tell the consumer the truth about this processing step. The almonds you will buy in Wholefoods this fall may still say “raw almonds but they will have been subjected to high heat and a five log kill step…that they are calling Pasteurization”. This lie is being permitted by the marketing order!!

But there’s even more bad news since pasteurization, according to the Almond Board of California, involves a choice of steam, high heat or, we kid you not, highly toxic and carcinogenic propylene oxide once used as a racing fuel, an insecticidal fumigant and an ingredient in thermobaric weapons. Thank you Almond Board and FDA!

But it turns out we all may have been buying pasteurized and bad tasting almonds all along without knowing it. Hidden in this little reported story is the dirty secret of how Trader Joe’s is able to offer cheap nuts. According to D & S Ranches, which runs a group of orchards in California’s San Joaquin Valley,

The Almonds that you see in retail stores, particularly the big chains, and membership stores, are usually very inferior for a number of reasons.

First, they are almost never a single variety, but rather a “mix” of many different Almonds. They are rarely sized for uniformity or inspected for quality and they contain a large portion of broken and scratched nuts and are mostly smaller nuts. This reduces the wholesale costs on the nuts and increases the profit for the store..

But the biggest problem is the transportation and storage. They are usually not stored properly and are exposed to odors around them in warehouses that contain everything from cases of motor oil to TV sets. They have endured truck rides around the country, in and out of long storage periods in hot warehouses or “distribution centers”. Proper industry standard cold storage is critical to maintain nut quality, and large chain stores do not have the facilities, the expertise, and frankly don’t care very much about, proper storage.

Recently large chains like Trader Joes and Costco have begun obtaining “pasteurized” Almonds This is a disaster. It effectively destroys all the delicate Almond Flavor, but it has one big benefit. It allows enormous profit for the store. This is because, “just any old nuts” including ones that are years old, imported from unknown sources and perhaps not USDA inspected, of questionable quality, to be “thrown into the pasteurizer machine” and the resulting nuts can be made safe for human consumption! They are tasteless and terrible, but you can safely eat them, and you will be happy to know that you are helping the share holders of that big corporate chain, because they bought the nuts for a fraction of what quality fresh nuts would cost.

The other moral here is to incorporate nut trees into your landscaping. Why plant a useless ficus tree when you can plant something that will provide food? And come harvest time you wont need to mix in any racing fuel.

Leave a comment

4 Comments

  1. This is a truly horrific practice. Somehow I doubt mainstream media will hop on board for this one.

  2. Another problem with the pasteurization of nuts is that it destroys the Omega-3 and Omega-6 naturally present in nuts. Can you tell us where to get affordable, reliable raw almonds? Also, does the don’t-ask-don’t-tell marketing policy apply to other nuts?

  3. my understanding is that farmers that sell direct to the public are not required to pasteurize their almonds. Just one more reason to shop your local farmers market. Plus last Saturday I bought some “saturn” peaches at the farmers market for $2/lb, later the same day I was in Safeway and saw the same peaches for $5.99/lb incredible!!

  4. So what this really means is that pastuerized nuts result in lower birth rates, and other physical ailments which translates into big money for pharma. Raw nuts result in healthier people, happier people and provide so many benefits. I wouldn’t be surprised if they got their boys at CDC and planted a few vials of salmonella on the almonds to justify this. Not only that, You cannot find practically anything on google when it comes to this. All stories and links are dead I had to yahoo. Crazy world.

Comments are closed.