Food
Food Labeling and Consumer’s Bias
Let’s start with this: it’s your special someone’s birthday. You want them to be happy, and you also want them to know your dedication to them. Therefore, after countless self-arguments and scrapped ideas, you decide to bake a treat. It could be a cake, a couple of macarons, or a half-dozen muffins. Whatever that may be, you manage to gather the ingredients-flour, water, sugar, and more-but notice the recipe needs a lot more eggs. You head to the market to buy eggs. You see them, labeled with different names. As you want your special someone to have the healthiest thing, you decide on the one that seems organic, named ‘cage-free’. It should be organic, with the chickens stress-free from a cageless environment, which in turn indicates a high-quality egg, right?
Except it isn’t. Cage-free, in legal terms, only means that the chickens are raised in an environment without cages. Doesn’t that mean that they are set free? No. This sentence has a loophole; chickens can be crammed in a small barn, and they are still labeled ‘cage-free’ as there are no cages.
This kind of marketing, the one that advertises ‘health benefits’ while selectively mentioning information, was first introduced with Kool-Aid. It was first advertised to be abundant in vitamin C, causing many parents to buy Kool-Aid for their sweet-tooth children. Buying drinks abundant with vitamin C seemed more reasonable than giving sweet soft drinks that would rot their teeth. It was a big hit, yet what the parents didn’t know was that Kool-Aids were drenched with large amounts of sugar. So yeah, this kind of marketing isn’t very new. And yes, unfortunately, they are legally not a scam.
As a fellow customer who struggles to eat healthy as much as possible, I was initially shocked at how these companies manage to deceive us and take advantage of people who want organic food. Wanting to eat healthier is an innate need for many people. Soft drinks are transitioning to be sugar-free, fresh salads are emerging as a trend, and various healthy food recipes are gaining popularity. It’s a general trend by now, and the companies also know that. That’s why they chose to use specific diction like this to emphasize how healthy and good they are, so the customers are willing to consume them.
What labels are misleading, like the one I explained to you earlier: Cage-free? You would want to avoid labels that contain the word: Natural. According to the FDA, which processes 80% of the US food supply, states “that nothing artificial or synthetic (…) has been included in, or has been added to, a food that would not normally be expected to be in that food”. Seems pretty solid, right? Think as in the logic earlier: if you were a company, how could you exploit the consumers from this definition? See that the definition only focuses on the process of the food, not how it is produced in the first place. You could insert hormones into the meat and drain the plants with pesticides. In addition, the definition leaves plenty of room for food manufacturing methods-where the ingredients could go under pasteurization or irradiation.
Then what should we do as customers? As there are too many loopholes for companies to exploit people from, we first have to know what we should prioritize. We want to eat healthy, so that is why we find organic and avoid GMOs. GMOs are too risky, right? They may not be safe to eat, and even cause cancer! However, there is no scientific evidence that shows that GMOs are lacking in terms of safety. GMOs are safe to eat and highly likely to be more nutritious than their non-GMO counterparts. This means that next time you shop for corn, you don’t have to factually check if the one you picked up is GMO or not.
In addition, a common misconception that customers have is that ‘natural’ leads to being healthy and nutritious. This seems like a reasonable notion; nature is the source of our veggies and fruits, which are definitely healthier than artificial chemicals. However, we also need to remember that venomous snakes, poisonous mushrooms, and radioactive chemicals exist in nature. Man-made chemicals contain medicine in various fields. Although there is debate on whether vaccines and medicine are harmful, scientifically speaking, they are definitely helpful for people in need of medical support. This means the next time you look for labels, you don’t necessarily have to struggle to find the ones that are written ‘natural’, in addition to the falsity of the label itself mentioned in the previous passage.
The food regulation in the US is not poor, but definitely not the best; it has misleading labels that intentionally use vague definitions to confuse consumers. Therefore, it is essential for us, as customers, to understand how labeling and food work and make informed choices according to our preferences.
By: Catherine Kim
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