Pinkberry: Definitely Not a Desert and Aparently Not Natural
Thursday, April 24th, 2008
I was cruising through Cooking With Amy and I came across her assessment of the reemergence of healthy, natural frozen yogurt. She’s pretty much spot on.
I’ve been to Pinkberry here in LA and while it’s OK, I can tell you right now it’s not a desert. Not in the western sense. We think of a desert as something sweet you eat at the end of a meal. Kind of a reward for choking down all that meat. Go Me. Pinkberry, however, is very much an Asian version of a desert. That is, something kind of bitter that cleanses your pallet of the over spiced food you just consumed so you don’t taste pickled cabbage and dried fish for the rest of the night.
photo credit: psychofish
This is confusing to anyone alive in America during the 80s. We consumed a frozen yogurt so treacly it gave you diabetes if you looked at it. That’s because American marketing execs figured out that we love the label ‘Fat Free’ but not the taste that comes with it. So in order to make it feel like desert to Americans they compensated with a half gallon of corn syrup.
Remember all those middle aged women saying “I can’t believe it’s actually good for me” while scarfing down TCBY and watching the scale spin ever upward. That’s why.
So the new frozen yogurt is really the old frozen yogurt before we Americanized it. That’s why you can only get it in places that are trendy(SF) or full of Asians(LA). Middle America just isn’t all that interested in paying $3 to stop tasting dinner.
And then I come to find out via BoingBoing that this new ‘natural frozen yogurt’ isn’t all that natural at all.
The ingredients list for Original Pinkberry has 23 items. Skim milk and nonfat yogurt are listed first, then three kinds of sugar: sucrose, fructose and dextrose. Fructose and maltodextrin, another ingredient, are both laboratory-produced ingredients extracted from corn syrup.
So it’s overpriced, not a desert and not what most people(those without lab coats) would consider natural. When can I get my franchise?
