The Gimmicks of Food Labeling
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Well why are you bringing celery juice anywhere near my salami? Is it because of the nitrates, hmm?
It's silly that regulations apparently allow producers to market differently according to the source of the nitrates (mineral vs plant). And now producers are locked in a dilemma where they must appeal to ignorant consumers who think "uncured" is somehow healthier. Sorry people, when it comes to colon cancer you can't have your bacon and eat it too.
We’ve decided on the approach of replacing real regulation with class action lawsuits. And if that’s the case, I’m damn glad there are people holding the manufacturers feet to the fire (or the lack of fire, in the case of Bkue Diamond).
I’d be happy to replace this whole system with some real, effective regulation. But until that day, I’m very skeptical of anyone who wants to get rid of class action lawsuits.
Maybe McDonald's didn't sponsor the mockery but it's one of my favorite conspiracy theories cause I'm sure them and their related companies benefited from the mockery.
I actually learned the true details of the case for the first time when I had jury duty, and the lawyer brought it up and asked questions about it during voir dire.
I suppose it's "correct" in the sense that 0.49g rounded to the nearest gram is 0g. For reference, a sugar cube is ~4g, a can of coke has about 32g of sugar, and daily recommended intake for "free sugars" is about 30g, so their ~0.49g of sugar amounts to ~1.5% of daily intake, and amounts to about 2 calories per TicTac. That's not a whole lot, but it's not the "0" claimed on the package, either.
I'd wager very few people actually consider a single TicTac to be a serving. A handful at least, a whole box probably not being unusual.
I mostly just wanted to contextualize these numbers a bit: what does 0.49g or 4.9g sugar actually mean?
Would you similarly list nutrition facts per grain of rice, or per french fry?
It's deliberately misleading, and a serving is supposed to reflect real-life portion sizes that'd typically be consumed. Eat the box, and you've consumed nearly as much sugar as an 8oz bottle of Coke.
And it's misleading, yes, but only by rounding everything down to 0.
Nor a single TicTac, for the most part. I'm sure there's someone out there who does, but it's certainly not standard practice.
A box that's full of a food item that's 95% sugar simply shouldn't be able to list itself as zero sugar.
Obviously; we already agreed on that from the start. All that remains is the (IMHO very minor) disagreement whether the information should be listed "per capsule", "per n capsules", or "per n weight unit(s)", or "per box". It seems to me that "per capsule" is by far the easiest for consumers as that's the easiest, but it's really a minor detail.
https://www.tictac.com/uk/en/products/tic-tac-flavours-fresh...
https://www.asa.org.uk/advice-online/food-hfss-overview.html
Also, I don't know how it is in the US, but here in Japan, it happens more often than I'd like that there's some nutrition info for some amount of stuff (usually 100g), but nowhere you can tell how much stuff there is. You actually have to buy and weigh it to know. In some cases, it is written, but then you have to do the math yourself.
Another is food packaging listing the calories by serving size, which is a completely arbitrary amount. So if I want to know how many calories I just consumed, I first have to do arithmetic to figure out how many calories are in the full package, and then do another calculation based on how much I ate.
Neither of these things are illegal, however. They are cheap tricks intended to make it harder to figure out wtf it is you're actually buying and eating.
Every good ice cream is. It has to be, otherwise it would be a block of hard ice, regardless of the quality of ingredients.
You are right, though, in that it could be misleading. In Europe it's generally also sold by volume, but both volume and weight is present on the label, like this: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F....
In Australia we have the ACCC as our consumer protection body, which does great work in this space. When I travel overseas I'm marveled by the lack of standardisation of ingredient and nutritional information presented in other countries.
It sounds like in lieu of a strong consumer protection body the US falls to random lawyers like this to keep industry players in line. This mechanism doesn't seem to work at all.
Just have vague memories of this being hilarious and thought it was one episode, guess I didn't realize it was a series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECa1toPGth4
a quote from [1] :
'Food fraud can take place in many forms. A company might substitute one product for another, use additives or enhancements that are not approved or misrepresent the country of origin of the product. Stolen food shipments or intentional contamination of the product is also considered food fraud.
Food fraud is a continuum of deception. At one end of spectrum, there is the deliberate substitution of inferior and potentially harmful ingredients. At the other end is the mislabeling of common products by the largest food companies. The largest food companies will not engage in outright food fraud intentionally by using different ingredients that could be harmful. Instead, they typically would engage in a more subtle deception – all natural claims, no preservatives, healthy, yet containing lots of chemicals, etc.'
1. Non-dairy coffee creamer usually contains milk products, so even though it's "non-dairy" it's not vegan
2. Ingredients are listed by percent, and nobody wants "sugar" as their top ingredient, so lots of products will sink it down the list by having sugar, and syrup, and honey. 3 small ingredients instead of 1 big ingredient, but you're still just eating sugar.
3. They aren't required to say which coloring / flavorings come from beaver ass or bug shells, which is completely sanitary I'm sure, but also just disgusting.
4. Gelatin isn't vegetarian. This is more non-labeling than mis-labeling. It's just weird to think candies like marshmallows and gummy bears typically have meat in them.
I went to look this up and the first "non-dairy" creamer I came across literally says "CONTAINS: MILK" on the back. Its a small amount, but still seems pretty blatantly deceptive.
Damn, that's a sneaky one I haven't heard before. Thanks for sharing!
Gluten free. No wheat.
All natural. This means nothing at all. The makers of 7-Up claim soda is natural because the enzymes used to make high fructose corn syrup are natural.
Fat Free. Probably lots of sugar.
No High Fructose Corn Syrup. Uses sugar instead of HFCS.
No MSG. MSG isn't harmful.
No nitrates. Often they just use "celery juice" which is naturally high in nitrates.
I once saw "dehydrated cane juice" listed instead of sugar. Come on!
I was curious and asked what sweetener they were using, expecting something like Erythritol.
Turns out "sugarless" means Agave Syrup.
Edit:
Not envying the naive Diabetic that falls for this.
What a noble man
(95% canola oil mixed with) OLIVE OIL (low grade)
This is the distilled essence of parasitism. Nitpicking product labels to sue large companies in the hopes of winning a jackpot -- or at least a settlement. Producing nothing of value whatsoever, but leeching off otherwise productive (and necessary) economic activity.
It's not a quiet comedy. It's a shame and a disgrace.
Imagine having that on the label of a pack of smokes
"If we lie enough, and everyone else does it to, nobody will have the time to check us on our bullshit" seems like a perfect example of non-productive economic activity that just adds additional costs to every transaction at no net positive social or economic gain.
"Oh no, I was tricked by this picture of an olive on the packaging! It's not entirely olive oil based after all! This calls for a major class action lawsuit."
How about you quote from either the article or the court case.
Its entirely reasonable to assume that a product that contains in its name "with Olive Oil" contains Olive Oil. The fact that it doesn't to me is _Fraud_; the company is attempting to get revenue (additional sales) by deceiving a consumer about the product.
> Reading, he made a startling discovery: the spread wasn’t made of olive oil, or even mostly made of olive oil. The primary ingredient was a processed blend of palm and canola oils. “I’d been drawn in because of the picture,” Clemmons told me. “And they knew that. I’m sure they knew that. Why wouldn’t people be attracted to things that are natural?”
But it did contain olive oil -- it just wasn't the sole oil source. I don't think that's fraud, and, again, anybody can read the label and make up their own mind. A lawsuit over this is a joke.
Also, implying that canola oil and palm oil aren't natural is pretty funny.
If I host the backend for that application on a bunch of Windows servers, but there's one server running that JavaScript service that's hosted on FreeBSD, and I advertise the product as "hosted on FreeBSD", is that sensible?
You seem to be clutching at straws to prove your point so I'm not sure that it's even helpful to engage with you, but "X is made with Y" when X is something that could be made entirely with Y implies that X is made entirely/almost entirely with Y. Not "we put a tiny bit of Y in so that we can say it's made with Y on the label" - which is exactly what happened here. It's intentionally misleading.
Could be that this company added some olive oil to their "plant spread" and wanted to visually distinguish this type from their alternative olive-free version. In any case, all nutrition facts are on the label -- the label clearly shows that the product is made of an oil blend -- and, as such, the picture of an olive on the packaging can hardly be "intentionally misleading" for more than about five seconds.
Could the average consumer be more educated? Sure. Could companies be less shitty about marketing their products in a misleading way? Yep.
Let me give you my favorite example of a legally acceptable (and actually used) marketing gimmick: a good source of calcium with milk! I've seen this on products with literally 0% calcium, because everything is a good course of calcium with milk. This comment is a good source of calcium with milk.
As to your example the issue isn't that it contains olive oil, but that it's not the primary oil used in the product when the labeling clearly implies that. It's a shitty marketing practice that misleads uninformed consumers into buying their product. Quit victim blaming and maybe we should just have marketing that isn't purposefully deceitful?
If the front tells a lie in 45 point font, and the only place the truth is discovered is in 9pt font on the back, it’s a fraud. Sorry, that’s just how it works.
You don’t have to list every ingredient on the front, but you can’t lie (or deliberately mislead) on the front, and get away with it because you told the truth on the back.
It's not even clear to me how much olive oil it contains; according to the label it's "made with blend of plant-based oils (Soybean, Palm Fruit, Palm Kernel, Olive and Extra Virgin Olive Oil)". 1% olive oil would satisfy that, and given the relative costs and probably small to non-existent flavour differences, I'm betting it's a lot closer to 1% than 99%.
"Not reading the nutrition label" basically means "accept that the front is just a bald-faced lie". I got shit to do and a life to lead, and I don't want to scrutinize tiny text for everything I buy just to check if the basic facts on the front are correct. This is why regulations exist in the first place.
[1]: https://www.countrycrock.com/en-us/our-products/plant-butter...
However, in this case, I wouldn't classify Sheehan's work as being parasitic. Companies are obviously being misleading and deceitful in order to sell more of their product. It makes sense to me that someone is out there holding their feet to the fire and forces them accurately market what they make.
> "Any product labeled as organic on the product description or packaging must be USDA certified"
A synthetic peach flavoring would almost certainly be unable to attain this sort of certification.
But calling a peach-flavored product "peach" is as old as the hills, and of course I'm okay with it.
Just like how 'organic' has a specific definition, a 'smokehouse' is: "a building where meat or fish is cured by means of dense smoke" [0]. So if the product is not cured in dense smoke in a building, then it cannot be marketed as smokehouse{d}.
It's as easy as using specific terminology to market their product. The fact that food producers don't, indicates to me that they're either stupid (and unaware of what words mean) or it's done maliciously (to mislead people).