New York Part 2 – Another Sugar Pusher and Cake Security Threat

The Great Cake Porn Tour
New York - Limited Cake Porn but Plenty of Sugar Pushers
New York Part 2 – Another Sugar Pusher and Cake Security Threat
Las Vegas - Supreme Cake Porn and Absurd Food Labelling
Yosemite National Park - More Blood Sugar Capers
San Francisco Part 1: Stretching the Definitions of Natural and Healthy
San Francisco Part 2 - My Proxy Cheesecake Shame

Before we left New York, I discovered another sugar pusher – The Vitamin Shoppe. On sale in their 3rd Avenue store were two offending items. First, chocolate-covered goji berries, whose top ingredient is chocolate which in turn has its constituent parts listed to include sugar. Second, fruit lollipops, the top ingredient of which is organic evaporated cane juice. As discussed in New York part 1, consuming this ‘alternative’ version of sugar is unlikely to mitigate the reasons it’s bad for you.

Certainly The Vitamin Shoppe ticks the boxes to qualify them for membership of the 'health food stores, worst sugar pushers of all' club. With a name like that it would test the bounds of rationality to suggest they are not positioning themselves as a health food store and they are indeed selling sugar-laden products.

These two products did appear to be an afterthought, though. Other than a few, much less offensive trail-mix offerings, the shelves were populated entirely by – get this - vitamins. Okay, they did have a healthy stock of bodybuilding products too, no doubt riddled with artificial sweeteners – but that’s for another post entirely. So whilst The Vitamin Shoppe does get membership of the club, I question their commitment to the cause. If they are going to sell garbage masquerading as health food then they should either do a decent job of it or not do it at all.

In the meantime, on the great cake porn tour we found some superb cheese cakes at a deli on Wall Street but were not allowed to photograph them. The reason, we were told, was “No photographs,” which we had to conclude was for security reasons. This seemed plausible to me because I’d have been pretty upset to see such a fine set of cakes destroyed by an attack of some sort.

In any case, Mrs Methuselah was so taken by the marble chocolate cheesecake that she was driven to buy a large slab, which I then had to watch her consume in maddeningly small forkfuls. Needless to say I fought hard to disguise my schadenfreude on the subway ride back to the hotel as she battled the post-sugar sea-sickness.

The good news is that the restaurant in Terminal C at Newark Airport still sells the impossibly large cheesecake I mentioned in New York part 1, as you can see from the photo. You know you have found a real cake when its concrete equivalent would ruin the suspension on an SUV.

The Series:
The Great Cake Porn Tour
New York - Limited Cake Porn but Plenty of Sugar Pushers
New York Part 2 – Another Sugar Pusher and Cake Security Threat
Las Vegas - Supreme Cake Porn and Absurd Food Labelling
Yosemite National Park - More Blood Sugar Capers
San Francisco Part 1: Stretching the Definitions of Natural and Healthy
San Francisco Part 2 - My Proxy Cheesecake Shame

See Also:
Why (Refined) Sugar is Bad: Some References
The Worst Sugar Pushers of all: Health Food Stores
Julian Graves Responds to 'Sugar Pushers' Post (Worst Sugar Pushers Part 2)
The Worst Sugar Pushers of All Part 3 - Holland and Barrett Takes Centre Stage