Recently my diet has naturally featured less and less meat each week. Over the past 7-8 months my main method of transportation has been my bicycle and as such the food I eat doubles as my fuel too. With the new duel-nature of my food, I've naturally started eating more fruits and vegetables and less meat, partly because meat is tough to carry on the road (bruised fruit is still edible, whereas meat would hardly last an hour or two in my black backpack in the middle of summer) and partly because fruits and veggies give me better and more energy.

As my diet progressed away from meat I also noticed just how damn good everything tastes without meat overpowering everything. Now, I don't even miss meat! So much so that I've been considering switching to a completely vegan diet, at least for a trial for a month. The toughest thing to give up would be pizza, so when I saw this Soy Cheese Pizza from Amy's (makers of super-delicious frozen burritos) I had to give it a shot.

Amy's Frozen Soy Cheeze Pizza prior to cooking

Value

At $5.99 for a single person sized pizza, Amy's Soy Cheeze Pizza is at least comparable in cost to a delivery pizza. It's slightly cheaper than most small pizzas here in Boston, but remember to take into account the cost of cooking the pizza in terms of energy and time. Sure, it's a relatively easy process but it still does cost money to cook this pizza. Still, six dollars for a meal is reasonable.

Below is the nutritional information for this pizza as reported on Amy's Kitchen web-site. Note, the below figures are based off the box containing three servings, though realistically it's a small enough pizza for one person to mow down in one sitting.

Nutritional Facts

• 290 Calories
• 100 Calories from Fat
• 11 g Total Fat
• 1 g Saturated Fat
• 0 gTrans Fat
• 0 mg Cholesterol
• 590 mg Sodium
• 37 g Carbohydrates
• 2 g Fiber
• 3g Sugars
• 12 g Protein
• 80% Organic
• 4% Vitamin A
• 4% Vitamin C
• 2% Calcium
• 10% Iron

On its own, the soy cheeze pizza is not a great source of any nutrients, though it does have a fair amount of fiber and iron, as well as (obviously) being loaded with carbohydrates.

Score: 3 / 5

Quality

Though I was doubtful at first of soy's ability to match real cheese, the description on the back of the box of the soy melting into a mozzarella-esque pile of delicious gooeyness had my mouth watering. Plus my recent experience with soy cream "cheese" left me optimistic about this pizza. I fired up my oven to 425 degrees, waited for it to warm up and popped the soon to be warm, crispy but gooey pile of tomato, soy and crust into the oven.

12-14 minutes later, my excitement and anticipation disappeared as my eyes fell upon a slightly burnt but not melted pile of dough, sauce and half melted half burnt soy bits. The sight left me sadder than a kid at Christmas opening a big box to find clothes.

Score: 1 / 5

Amy's Soy Cheeze Pizza after cooking

Innovation

While I commend Amy's for their effort in taking the cheese out of cheese pizza, their soy based cheeze just does not compare to the real deal. The soy simply did not melt and instead either burned into a crisp or just stayed in its un-melted form. In either case it was honestly a bit nasty tasting, especially on the texture front. Having experienced the diversity of soy, I'm confident that this recipe could be tweaked to work but as is it simply does not mimic cheese. You're much better off just making a cheese-less pizza if you're trying to go the vegan route.

Score: 2 / 5

Social Benefit

Well, if you stockpile a bunch of these pizzas and thus do not get pizza delivery, there would be a net positive impact on the environment. Better yet, we could make our own pizzas from scratch using local ingredients and thus reduce the polluting impact even more.

These pizzas are loaded with salt and other preservatives, which is the last thing most Americans need more of. They're certainly not healthy but are most likely better for you than the average pizza shop. Amy's should be commended for at least attempting to make a vegan cheese-esque pizza, though the actual implementation falls far short.

Score: 2 / 5

Freestyle!

Somehow this soy cheese pizza ended up looking like a Barbecue chicken pizza, though unsurprisingly it did not taste like it at all.

Granted, I should have expected that the marketing on the back of the box wouldn't match up with reality, but I at least expected the soy "cheese" to melt! Instead, the soy sort of warmed up and kinda melted in some spots and kinda burned in other spots. The texture was decidedly not gooey and instead had a plasticy feel to it as the whole layer of cheese was connected and crunchy.

Still, I was hungry and food is food. I cut up the pizza into eight slices and after a few bites realized it wasn't as bad as it looked. The crust was actually quite good. Crispy and crunchy but also chewy enough in the right places. The sauce too was very, very good. Still, the disappointment of the cheese n bits topping overpowered the goodness of the sauce and crust.

Perhaps I'll try this soy cheese pizza again (especially if I go through with my month of veganism experiment and fiend for pizza) but this first time was disappointing though edible.

Score: 8 / 22

Amy's Soy Cheeze Pizza is available at Stop & Shop, Shaw's and other supermarkets.

Complete Score: 16 / 42 = 38%

Two of the best years of my life were spent in the college town of Chapel Hill in North Carolina. There I learned many, many things about my southern brethren that were unknown to me before. Chief among them was their love of sweet tea. Every single restaurant down there had sweet tea. I quickly found out that a well made (usually homemade) sweet tea was like liquid crack. One day while perusing the aisles of my local Shaw's supermarket I stumbled upon Sweet Leaf The Original Sweet Tea and knew I had to try it.

Value

At $1.59 for 16 fluid ounces, this bottle of sweet tea is not cheap. Granted, it's not super-expensive either but it's certainly not cheap, especially considering I could probably make 4-5 times as much of my own sweet tea for the same price. Still, it is quite tasty and very refreshing when served cold. Part of that price includes the glass bottle, and I'll certainly pay a little bit more for glass over plastic. It might not be cheaper than other bottled teas, but it's for sure a heck of a lot cheaper than a trip to North Carolina!

Plus, a bottle of The Original Sweet Tea supplies you with 12% of your daily iron requirement, so it's not all empty calories and sugar.

Score: 3 / 5

Look refreshing? It was...

Quality

The bottle says "Homemade Goodness in a Bottle" and I will give credit where credit is due and admit this is the closest in taste to the south's sweet tea I've found up north. It's still not quite as good as some of the homemade sweet teas I've had but for a mass produced product, it's as close as we're gonna get. It is authentic sweet tea, as it's made in Austin, Texas, but it just lacks that freshly brewed and poured out of a big cool pitcher homemade taste.

Score: 4 / 5

Innovation

Sometimes the taste of a food item goes beyond just the ingredients. Such is the case with Sweet Leaf, as their labels and web-site are adorned with a nice cartoonish image of Granny, who if you ask any Southerner is for sure the master of sweet tea in any household. I'm dead serious too, there are many families who have been passing down their sweet tea recipes for several generations now.

More importantly, Sweet Leaf uses organic ingredients and keeps their recipe simple (water, tea, cane sugar, and citric acid). Sometimes simple and natural is innovative in itself. Such is the case here.

Score: 4 / 5

Social Benefit

Well, sweet tea is certainly not the healthiest of beverages but if more people drank sweet tea instead of what the soft drinks and alcohol they're drinking now we'd be a lot healthier of a nation! Moderation, as always, is key and if you have a sweet tea every now and then it's not going to destroy society as we know it. On the other hand, the pollution released by shipping so many bottles all over the world for something that we can all make at home isn't the best thing for society either.

Sweet Ol Granny makes some sweet tea...picture via Sweet Leaf Tea web-site

On the other hand, Sweet Leaf uses organic ingredients. They also help charities and non-profits, such as Big Brothers Big Sisters, Multiple Sclerosis Society and Breast Cancer Research. Sweet Leaf is a relatively small company and looks like a nice place to work at too.

Score: 3 / 5

Freestyle!

As I wrote in the introduction, good homemade sweet tea is like liquid crack. When I moved back up north to Boston I couldn't help but fiend for some good sweet tea every now and then. Thankfully, Sweet Leaf's Original Sweet Tea handles those cravings well. Now, someone born and raised in the South may disagree with me, but I think this sweet tea is damn, damn good. Pour me another!

Score: 18 / 22

The Original Sweet Tea by Sweet Leaf is available at Stop & Shop, Shaw's and many other supermarkets.

Complete Score: 32 / 42 = 76.2%

A White Pineapple, or Kona Sugarloaf, has white flesh with no woodiness in the center, and no acid content. It is cylindrical in shape and very sweet due to its high sugar content. I highly recommend this food to anyone who eats. Pineapples contain calcium, phosphorous, potassium and beta-carotene, as well as bromelain, a potent digestive enzyme which scavenges bacteria and parasites in the digestive system. Pineapples are a good source of manganese and Vitamin C, packing nearly all your daily serving of each in just a one cup serving.

Value

…well it’s just fantastic.

In terms of resources spent both on production and transport to get it from the farm to my kitchen, there is some significant effort involved. Fresh, ripe pineapple is expensive. It's soft and delicate and therefore great care must be taken in its transportation. Most pineapple that gets shipped is either picked green - so it can ripen while it travels the globe - or more often it gets canned. Since this particular pineapple was a hand delivered gift from a place I've actually been, its value is infinite. Still, even if I had to pay the significant costs involved in getting it, I would. Fresh and ripe is the only way to eat a white pineapple, since it's high sugar content is what you want. The value of this perfectly ripened fruit more than makes up for it's significant cost.

Score: 5 / 5

Hmmm...sugar

Quality

I can say, without hesitation or hyperbole, that this was the best pineapple I've ever had. It was even better than the ones I had when I was actually on the farm where they grow. I imagine that has a lot to do with the relative rarity of the experience, of actually having one in Boston, that made this one extra sweet. And plus this sucker was perfectly ripe the instant my bro walked through my front door with it under his arm.

Score: 5 / 5

Innovation

There really isn't much innovation involved in how this piece of fruit came to be in my possession. Fresh exotic fruits travel on planes every day. Being personally acquainted with the land that produced this awesome cylinder of sugar is what made it so especially enjoyable for me, though, so there is definitely a degree of uniqueness here that is unlikely to be paralleled by anything I buy from a corporation.

Score: 3 / 5

Social Benefit

In order for this pineapple to be picked and delivered while ripe, the burning of fossil fuels and a flight of about six thousand miles was required. That's pretty extravagant just for delivering a few minerals and nutrients to my belly. But considering that the average piece of food consumed by an American travels 1500 miles before it reaches his or her plate, this super duper above average food didn't do anything unheard of to get to me. Also, my brother did work to earn that fruit payment. And in doing so, he helped to sustain the local organic farming economy.

Score: 3 / 5

The organic jungle farm

Freestyle!

This particular White Pineapple was hand delivered, all the way from Hawaii to Boston, by my brother, who is home for a few months from the eastern coast of the Big Island where he works on a couple organic farms. I've been there. We visited him, my Dad and my other brother and I, as a graduation present when I finished school. We spent a week and a half at an awesome home- turned- retreat on an organic farm in the Hawaiian jungle ( what remains of it).

When I purchase organic fruits and veggies at the market, the little stickers are my only connection to the source of that food. To have a fresh, fragrant, perfectly ripened, organic, delicious Kona Sugarloaf from the most isolated islands in the world, from a farm that I've been to...well it's just fantastic.

Score: 21 / 22

Get you some.

Complete Score: 37 / 42 = 88.1%

While perusing the aisles of Whole Foods earlier this evening my eyes came across a sinister sounding citrus fruit, the organic Australian blood orange. I actually kept walking and within a few steps stopped and said, wait a minute, a blood orange?

I backed up and sure enough the sign said blood oranges and even the outer skin of the orange was in fact, bloody red. These oranges were a fruit I had to try and so I tossed three in my basket and made my way through the rest of the store.

Value

Whenever I shop at Whole Foods I nearly always spend more than I planned to. Still, I'm nearly always satisfied and feel the few extra dollars were worth it. The blood oranges registered at $3.99 a pound. My three medium sized oranges totaled 1.22 lbs costing me $4.87 total. At $1.63 per orange these little suckers cannot be called cheap. Still considering they are organic and shipped half way across the world to satisfy my hunger, $3.99 per pound is a relative bargain.

Organic Australian Blood Orange

After devouring these delicious bloody oranges, I did a little bit of research on Wikipedia and found that blood oranges usually obtain their tell-tale color via a pigment called anthocyanin. This pigment not only gives these oranges a unique color but it is also an antioxidant, which many people now believe has a ton of disease fighting properties. Personally, I'm a big fan of antioxidants and find foods and drinks that contain them do make me feel better and give me a nice energy boost.

Wikipedia went on to state that a medium sized orange will contain about 130% of one's daily Vitamin C requirement, 15% of one's potassium and 28% of one's daily dietary fiber requirement. For $1.63, that's a fairly large amount of nutrients. I'm also a big fan of organic produce and feel it tastes better and believe it is healthier than conventionally grown produce. Considering the amount of nutrients per orange, and the taste and health benefits of organic produce, the price is worth it.

Score: 4 / 5

Quality

Wow, these things were bloody delicious! My first bite instantly reminded me of a tangerine flavor, and indeed Wikipedia hypothesizes these oranges were an ancient hybrid between a pomelo and a tangerine. These oranges have a sweet refreshing taste with much less acidity than oranges I normally eat. As you can see from the picture above, there are literally rivers of moisture pumping through its fibrous interior.

Due to their unique color and sweet taste, blood oranges make for a great juice and would go well in many recipes, from jams and marmalade to cakes and sweets. Personally, these oranges were so good raw I'd recommend just slicing them up and mowing 'em down.

Score: 4.5 / 5

Innovation

Well, blood oranges are certainly not new to the world nor the marketplace, so they are certainly not innovative in the traditional sense. However, organic produce and the massive global distribution of it is innovative in business terms, though organic farming is not new. Over the past couple of years, consumers have demanded and bought more organic foods and companies have provided more and more organic selections. It's a good trend and perhaps one day all our food will simply be organic.

Hmm...bloody and yummy!

We also should consider that breeding the pomelo and tangerine, or whichever fruits the breeders actually used, is innovative and brought us this great tasting fruit.

Score: 4 / 5

Social Benefit

Organic produce is good for us and for our environments, so Global Organics NZ Limited gets credit for using organic processes for all of their foods and Whole Foods gets credit for stocking organic produce. Still, the USA has regions where these blood oranges could have been grown, and in fact blood oranges are grown in parts of California and Florida. Locally grown foods are much better for us as they are fresher and better for the environment as less resources are needed to transport the food from farm to plate.

Still, I have to wonder how the taste varies from regions here to Australia. My experience has been that Australia and New Zealand produce very good tasting fruits and perhaps their soil and climate is better suited to grow these blood oranges. If they have an absolute advantage for growing this brand of blood orange, does it overtake the comparative advantage of growing them closer to home?

If Australian blood oranges taste much better than homegrown oranges, they would likely encourage more people to eat oranges rather than some other alternative. In a nation with a huge obesity epidemic, it is tough to fault Global Organics NZ LTD for being a member of the global economy while we have much more crucial social issues to deal with at the moment.

Global Organics does take steps to reduce its footprint, for instance using recyclable packaging and composting. It won't completely offset the fossil fuels used to transport their produce worldwide but it's a good start. As is, the energy used to transport organic blood oranges from Australia is simply not the most pressing social issue of our time. Note, after this review was published Global Organics informed us that these oranges are sent via sea freight, as is most produce out of New Zealand and Australia. As shipping via sea contributes less carbon per tonne shipped than shipping via air, we've increased the social benefit score for these oranges to a 4.

Score: 4 / 5

Freestyle!

I love oranges. There is nothing quite like a tall glass of fresh OJ or a nice juicy orange to renew your senses and refresh your taste buds. Having tasted many oranges in my life, from the days of sucking back orange slices at half-time of high school football games to the morning after glass of orange juice, whenever I really need a blast of energy oranges are the first food I reach for.

These organic blood oranges from Australia, produced and distributed by Global Organics NZ LTD, are among the best oranges I've had. Just take a look at the picture at the top of this review and tell me that orange does not look delicious. Go ahead, I dare you.

Score: 20 / 22

Organic Australian Blood Oranges are produced and distributed by Global Organics NZ LTD and sold by Whole Foods Market and other retailers worldwide.

Complete Score: 36.5 / 42 = 86.9%