DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Wandering around this year’s Green Festival exhibition, I was impressed by how healthy everybody looked. In contrast, take as an example MacWorld Expo, at which many of the attendees are overweight, overdressed, hurried, harried, and ill. I see a lot more armpit stains (an indicator of stress) at MacWorld.

The Green Festival is all about improving one’s health. Litter in the nearest parking lot indicated that the neighborhood residents were partaking of healthy supplements this weekend too.

Vendors hawked high-potency foods, air and water treatments, pesticide-free clothing, recycled building products, solar energy systems, and biodiesel fuel. No wonder I felt at home. At both expos I’m surrounded by nutballs, but only at the Green Fest are the nutballs organic.

Miracle foods were a dominant meme at this year’s festival. I sampled Maca, “the Inca superfood,” although I have to wonder how super this particular food is given that the Inca civilization is extinct. I ate raw cocoa nuts and numerous organic chocolate elixirs. I tasted hemp nuts, Goji and agauaymanto berries. I skipped the soy jerkey and the $5 Sambazon smoothies, made from açaí, a purple palm berry from the Amazon basin that has been scientifically proven to be mispronounced by even more people than jicama.

The vendors of these superfoods, to which all manner of magical properties have been ascribed, appeared to be hydrated, energized, and outrageously healthy. Their collective glow made for a compelling pitch. In general, I think it’s a bad idea to buy food products from people who look like they’re about three more corndogs away from the grave, but I admit that I may be alone in making such a judgement, as evidenced by the crowds around the food-sample stations at Costco on weekends.

The visible good health may have been from an abundance of negative ions winging around the space, both from high-end beeswax candles and this so-called filterless air cleaner (about which some controversy exists). Negative ions notwithstanding, we were certainly awash in positive vibes.

A few other healthy-planet products caught my attention: tree-free inkjet paper (my samples are en route; watch for a review soon), magnet-powered unbreakable LED flashlights, and elegant recycled stemware and tumblers. If nothing else, this Green Festival helped fill out my upcoming holiday gift guide.