Month: <span>October 2015</span>

The jig is up.

Give up the ghost.

Stop the madness.

(Your turn to share your fave phrase for calling bullshit.)

Bees, it’s official. Hate to say it, but we know what you think. What you really think. And not all of you, but many. Actually, a lot of you….and you of the Collective You know who you are, always lamenting on Insta and FB about why organic juice is so frigging expensive.

It’s a fact that seems to confound you. Leaves you totally perplexed. Some of you even feign shock that the cost of our cold-pressed juice, nut milks, smoothies, espresso drinks and chewables like salads and fruit leathers and nut butters—all made from the best ingredients that money can buy—is unrealistically high despite taking the very best of something (organic produce) and turning it into the very best of something else (our menu of deliciousness).

Really, Bees. We ask you: Would you not expect two gorgeous copulating people to create a beautiful baby? Don’t other amazing things—chocolate and peanut butter, Parmigiano-Reggiano and a crisp pear, stripes and florals, wine and everything—come together to make the best of the best? That’s what happens when juiceries like The Juice Standard (TJS) decide to commit to using organic produce in their products. The math seems simple: When we use the best, we get the best. And though it’s sometimes a little sad for your wallet, it’s baller for your health.

See, we know our juice is spendy compared to others in the Great Juicy Las Vegas Landscape. TJS’s cold-pressed stuff made from sumptuous, 100-percent organic ingredients is in fact more than the $6, $7 or $8 bottles sold outside our walls. Honestly? As a full-fledged member of Ye Mighty Planet-wide Coalition Of Companies That Sell Organic Ingestibles*, for the life of us we cannot figure out how to politely defend our pricing to all y’all without seeming defensive. And since in our defenselessness our safety lies, instead of flat-out coming off as whiny bitches who just wanna be understood, hows about we use a real-life example of the unabashed price differential between organic food and its conventional cousin?

So last week, TJS’ fearless COO Marcella priced conventional romaine lettuce at $11 a case. Know the price of the very same variety, grown and harvested organically? Between $30 and $40 per case. For the same product!

Same.product.

So for a pile of delicate greens that most assuredly soaked up every blessed pesticide a conventional farmer doused ‘em with to make ‘em grow, TJS paid nearly double for the naked stuff, just to ensure that your bod (and the bods of those you love) stayed healthy and undeniably pesticide free. And beelieve it: With no tough skin to scrub or peel, if the lettuce was fed something like, oh, Roundup, everyone who ate it would eat it, too.

Marcella paid double for your naked lettuce. And it’s a choice she and Jamie make with every order.

If you superstar mathletes out there multiply that kind of price point difference by all the produce we use in our juices, nutmilks and chewables, by now it must be easier to see why every organic product a juicery sells is going to be more expensive than conventional. But we figure it’s worth it, since our products run no risk of getting Roundup into your system.

(Roundup. You know Roundup, right? The stuff that yet again was outed by Reuters to have another lawsuit against it for allegedly causing cancer in the farmers who have long sprayed it on their plants, among others.)

Conventional products, conventionally speaking, aren’t unheard of on conventional farms…but you’ll never have to worry about that with TJS’s organic partner farms. Want proof? Here’s a handful of the as-local-as-we-can-find-‘em farmers we partner with to buy organic produce for your juice:

Thanks to our info graphic-making friends at The Organic Center, we can get a pretty clear visual of how far reaching the choice to buy organic really is.

Nevada Fresh Pak

Cal-Organic Farms

Viva Tierra Organic

Something Good Organics

Grimmway Farms

Del Rey Avocado Company

Jamie and Marcella say this all the time and it bears repeating: You can pay for your health now, or you can pay for your sickness later. Our organics-believing customers respect our choices. We hope you do, too.

So when you see that our juice costs more than the average bear’s, know that we’re not pressing for the Benjamins. We’re pressing for values…and that value is twofold for us: We press for the value of filling our bodies with the most nutrient-dense liquid we can, and we press for the value that today’s care is tomorrow’s prevention.

What are your values?

*not a real coalition. We just have a flare for the dramatic.

HOW on Earth is it that a well-known staple food in our healthy food lexicon has gotten a bad rap? Why, by piling it with a bunch of unhealthies that render its produce a nutritional no-no…unless, of course, the salad you eat is ours. Introducing…the TJS “Chewing Menu.”

So, a recent health headline that kinda made us take a step back was about how overrated salad is (or at least according to the venerable Washington Post). It was in this opinion piece by Tamar Haspel, a thoughtful journey who is well versed in writing about food, food supply issues, farming, and the like, and it made some freaking good points about how there are better ways to get our fruits and vegetables than the salad that society has taught is good for us.

Now. As with all opinion articles it’s important to absorb info with a colossal grain of pink Himalayan sea salt. But Haspel’s point was beeyond interesting: What we throw on a salad can weigh it down so much that our well-intentioned base of veggies we use for this so-called “healthy meal” get lost ‘neath a mountain of animal-based protein, processed add-ons and the crunchy, empty-calorie goodies that often come from factories, not nature.

Haspel even goes on to say that even without all the tasty bits and dressings that can cause more harm than good, the basis of our salads is often a pile of leafy greens with little to no nutritional value. It’d be one thing if we consistently veered toward spinach, kale and chard; but most folks build bowls with a pile of non-organic iceberg, which on the healthy-veg scale is low-low-low.

Harumph.

Does Haspel say we should all stop gettin’ our inner Peter Rabbit on as we graze on raw, gardeny goodness? No. But might the occasional salad of garden-grown greens with richly homemade buttermilk blue cheese dressing and thick-slab, non-hormoned bacon crumbled on top become something of a treat? It might. Beecause if we’re talking pure nutrition here—if we’re really trying to eat for fuel and energy, say, 80 percent of the time and maybe just for “fun” the other 20—there are better ways to get produce into your pretty little system.

Naturally, we’re about to offer up two winning ways to beat the conventional salad backlash. (And in case you were wondering, this absoLUTEly is the point in this post where TJS’s advice swoops in and saves the nutritional day. Ready? ‘Cause it’s happening now….)

1) DRINK your veggies via TJS cold-pressed juice.

2) Eat a salad…as long as it’s ours.

Fo’ sho’ you saw #1 coming. We’re pretty overt about reminding that you can drench your system with 2-3 pounds of organic produce any time you crack open a bottle of our cold-pressed juice. But our salad, you say? Wha?

Yes, Bees. We now have a new “Chewing Menu” that features among other items a field greens salad you may enjoy with a fork or make portable in the most delicious sun dried tomato wrap we’ve ever laid our lips on. Marcella’s and Jamie’s move toward a well-curated chewing menu is to help satisfy Bees’ needs for a nosh to go with a TJS juice. And an organic, thoughtfully crafted salad or wrap turns into near-Nutrition Perfection when washed down with even more produce.

Did you see we mentioned “field greens?” Our salad and wrap do in fact have lettuce, which Haspel
says is, in fact, a banner way to get water into your diet. And when topped with things like raw and organic hemp or chia seeds; raw nuts; and salad dressings with an ingredients list that doesn’t read like the dictionary, a TJS Field-Greens Salad gets clean, organic roughage into your body very easily…and chewing roughage is as important as knowing when to give your digestion a rest by drinking your produce.

When it comes down to it, Bees, nutrition’s about balance. Just like knowing when to hold ‘em. When to fold ‘em. When to walk away and when to run like a mofo. So as you start seeing more and more salads on the farmers table at The Rose, or see folks leaving The Hive with takeaway containers that will give them a healthy lunch, if you find yourself hungry and you’re close by, grab a salad or wrap–maybe some banana leathers or dates filled with Marcella’s kickass cashew-walnut butter—and see how a clean, organic salad can make you feel as light and delicious as it tastes.

Sing it, Kenny.

https://youtu.be/Jj4nJ1YEAp4

Archives for October 2015

The True Price of Organics: Pay today, play later.

Can there BEE such a thing as ‘unhealthy salad?’ Not at TJS!