Food Labels are Confusing

It began with a local health-news report that led me to the Consumer Reports website. The problem: Food labels are confusing. Not all claims and seals on food packaging can be trusted. 

Consumer Reports wants to help shoppers by making sense of some of the more common labels. But the labels they refer to are the ones designed to lure uninformed shoppers, enticing them to pay more for imaginary benefits like all-natural, non-GMO and organic.

I’ve written before about the science behind GMO foods and organic growing practices. Genetic modification acts as a short cut to the crossbreeding that has been practiced in farming for thousands of years. In some cases it will be the only way to save certain crops from going extinct due to diseases or pests. Organic produce has been tested and found to be marginally cleaner than traditionally grown crops, but if you wash your fruits and vegetables before preparing them, as everyone should, it makes no difference. (See the links for a fuller explanation or enter GMO or Organic in the search box in the upper left of this screen.)

Consumer Reports lists 6 seals of certification rated from fair to excellent: Grass Fed, Certified Humane, Animal Welfare, Non-GMO Project Verified, United Egg Producers, and USDA Organic. A deeper dive tells more about the certification process of each. For example, United Egg Producers Certified is rated fair overall for being very good in terms of verification but poor for animal welfare. Three labels are rated poor: Natural or All Natural, No Antibiotics, Non-GMO.

At a local grocery store I found seven different varieties of large eggs. Prices ranged from $1.09 for one dozen generic eggs in a gray container to $5.79 for a dozen labeled as organic and pasture raised. Priced between them were the cage free; cage free brown; free range; and the no-hormone, no antibiotic eggs. Apparently people will pay five times more for eggs to be reassured that the hens were leading a happy life, frolicking in a pasture. Of course, there is no label to tell how the hens are treated after they reach their 5- to 7-year period of peak production.

These decisions are mostly made by people who have never seen a chicken, pig or cow close up or visited a farm. They get their news from websites like this one that claims “rearing of farm animals today is dominated by industrialized facilities…that maximize profits by treating animals not as sentient creatures…” Each animal, according to them, is a “social, feeling individual capable of experiencing pleasure. The vast majority, however, are only familiar with deprivation, fear, and pain.” (Perhaps they called in an animal psychic or Dr. Doolittle to confirm this statement.)

Another site, with a more realistic and less of a concentration camp concept of farms, contradicts the factual part of the above statements. “About 98% of U.S. farms are operated by families – individuals, family partnerships or family corporations (America’s Diverse Family Farms, 2018 Edition).”

 Is this another form of virtue signaling, paying almost $6 per dozen for eggs because we care so much about chickens we will never meet? It’s no wonder that earlier this month the headline read: Consumer debt reaches record-high of $14 trillion.” As long as the cows, pigs and chickens are happy, what’s five dollars here and there?

Perhaps instead of trying to make sense of the seals and claims to help you understand the meaning behind them, Consumer Reports should have published the fact that most of those are simply marketing tactics playing on the egos, guilt and fears of consumers following the popular sentiment of the day.

What comes in the next issue, how to buy the right saddle for your unicorn?