Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Salon Columnists
Follow these links for the most recent column by:
Susie Bright
Robert Burton, M.D.
Joe Conason
Sean Elder
David Horowitz
Garrison Keillor
Anne Lamott
Greil Marcus
Joyce Millman
Camille Paglia
Amy Reiter
Mary Roach
Scott Rosenberg
Ruth Shalit
Michael Sragow
Virginia Vitzthum
Sarah Vowell
Cintra Wilson
Burt Wolf

+ Columnists' schedule

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Health & Body

Johnny get your pills
Are we overmedicating our kids?
By Rob Waters
[06/17/99]

Drunk like me
My last drink of tequila came on Easter -- resurrection day.
By Steve Burgess
[06/16/99]

Column
Sexual healing
An S/M couple rewrites the book of love.
By Virginia Vitzthum
[06/15/99]

Saving our skins
The FDA and dermatologists are arguing over sunscreen labels.
By Dawn MacKeen
[06/14/99]

Sexpert Opinion
How to ruin your sex life
Twelve anti-erotic tips for the puritanically inclined.
By Susie Bright
[06/12/99]

Complete archives for Health & Body

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Mary Roach

June 18, 1999 |I have long maintained that energy bars are as delicious as they sound. Here is food, one of life's great joys, packaged and presented as energy, as fuel, as though taste were as irrelevant to humans as it is to a Honda Prelude. If I wanted a convenient, nutritious high-energy snack, I'd pack a Mounds bar and a vitamin. Yet I am forced day by day to reconsider my position, owing to the advancing omnipresence of a bar called Clif. My husband eats Clif Bars. They're in Europe. They're in your corner store.

Leading me to wonder: Does the world have no taste, or is it me?

"It's you," said Clif Bar spokesman Dean Mayer. To prove it, he invited me to the company's headquarters in Berkeley, Calif., to taste some product. He was especially hepped up about a new one called the Luna bar, which was designed especially for women. (Hence the name Luna, for as we all know, women are attracted to anything that invokes the monthly cycle.)

Clif Bar, the corporation, pushes the envelope in the same way that Clif Bar the food item does. That is to say, you would not immediately recognize it as a member of its category. The furnishings at corporate headquarters include two climbing walls and a waiting room bench made from a snowboard. The in-house newsletter runs spelt cake recipes and features like "Match the Tattoos to the Employees." Most employees appear to be under 30, as evidenced not only by the tattoos but by their names, which bear the rebellious, demented orthography of youth: Kym, Terrye, Karin, Chelseah.

Mary Roach Mary Roach's column appears in Salon Health & Body every other Friday. + Biography + Archives

I told Mayer perhaps it isn't my gender that stands in the way of my enjoying energy bars, but my age. I am simply too old to embrace brown rice syrup and agave nectar, just as I am too old to tattoo a self-portrait on my arm (Chelseah) or sit comfortably on an unpadded snowboard. Mayer didn't think that this was so. He invited me to call company co-founder Gary Erickson's father, Clif, after whom the Clif bar is named. "He's 73 and he loves them." I was immediately suspicious. If Clif were really 73, he'd spell his name with the proper number of f's.

He is really 73. "They're great on the golf course!" said Clif when I called. "I eat 'em there. I eat 'em in the backyard. I've got 25 fruit trees that I take care of and so it's a good snack to have along. I even eat the Luna bars!"

I had heard that Clif's wife, Mary, teaches baking, and that her specialty is Danish pastries. I asked Clif to imagine being presented with one of Mary's apple Danishes and an Apple Cherry Clif bar. Which would he choose?

"That's easy, because they both fit properly in their proper place. Mary's danishes go over at breakfast time. In the afternoon, when I'm out on the go ..." Clearly I was barking up the wrong fruit tree.

Next page | I make oral contact with a LemonZest Luna bar