Improve your food vocabulary

A helping of knowledge will help the food lingo go down

The savoy cabbage is locally grown. The beets are organic. The cauliflower is conventional.

Whole Foods shoppers have grown accustomed to being bombarded with such descriptions of their groceries. Signs throughout the Raleigh store's produce section announce from what state or country the vegetables hail. Photos of local farmers hang above the lettuce and turnips. The fish counter is filled with haddock (wild-caught) and tilapia (farm-raised). The meat counter gleams with all-natural lamb chops, grass-fed steaks and Italian sausage made from locally raised pigs. The prepackaged bacon declares that is has no antibiotics -- ever, no added hormones -- ever and relied on all-vegetarian feeds. Biodynamic wines, fair-trade certified sugars and whipped buttery spreads made from non-GMO oils line the shelves.

These descriptors aren't confined to high-end grocery stores catering to the Birkenstock crowd, either. Stroll the aisles at your closest Harris Teeter or Food Lion and you'll find some of the same.

Consumers, regardless of where they shop, are becoming more curious, perhaps even wary, about their food. It's no wonder, amid revelations that their olive oil may actually be made from hazelnuts and sunflower seeds, that bottled water may be nothing more than packaged tap water and that last year's E. coli outbreak was connected to bagged spinach.

And so, food shoppers are being assailed by words that seem positive but can be puzzling.

"Natural" is not the same as "organic." "No hormones added" doesn't mean much with chickens or pigs since federal regulations prohibit hormone use on chickens and pigs. "Free range" means the chickens merely had access to the outdoors, not that they spent their time strutting in a barn yard.

"It's actually a huge minefield out there for the consumer," said John Bogert, a spokesman for Coleman Natural Foods, a Colorado-based meat company whose products sell at Whole Foods.

The label on Coleman Natural beef burgers reads: No Antibiotics. No Added Hormones Ever! No Preservatives Ever! Always Vegetarian Fed. Bogart says they are trying to give consumers as much information as possible about how their animals were treated.

Lynne Rosetto Kasper, an award-winning cookbook author, hosts the PBS radio show "The Splendid Table," which discusses the latest in food and wine and answers listeners' culinary questions.

"I don't know that we've ever been more concerned about the origin of our food. Where it's grown. How it's grown. How it gets to us," she said.

Kasper said consumers can use common sense to overcome concerns about the origins of their food. She recommends buying directly from the farmer, shopping a food co-op and buying what's locally grown and in season.

Peter Singer, an ethicist at Princeton University who co-wrote "The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter," recommends people gradually educate themselves about their food.

"The strategy is to educate yourself about one thing at a time -- environmental sustainability, fish, animal welfare, organics," he said. "If you try to do everything at once, it gets confusing."

To help keep track of what's what, check out the glossary of terms above.