Another sales gimmick

A consumer watchdog group Center for Science in the Public Interest submitted a petition last November to the Food and Drug Administration advocating a national system of symbols to adorn packaged foods. The idea is to create an easy method for consumers to spot healthy food products so they don't have to read through the fine print while grocery shopping.

Are you freaking kidding me?

Is this group made up of a bunch of kindergarten teachers? Do they think people are too stupid to read the nutritional labels on food products? They have to give us little colored dots to tell us what foods are good for us and what foods are bad?

Are they next going to devise a plan to give good, healthy eaters gold stars?

This is an insult to consumers.

They are denigrating the fact that food shopping for nutritious foods is a very important process and should not be trivialized by using colored labels.

It is bad enough that food manufacturers have resorted to using cartoon characters and flashy pictures and symbols to appeal to children to buy their sugar drenched crap that passes for food, now consumer groups are talking down to us too.

Maybe they think our lives are so hectic and tightly scheduled that giving us colored dots will get us through the trauma of shopping so we get out of the store faster.

Maybe they think we can’t understand what the hell the food companies are printing on their labels.

“Gee, I don’t know, 13 grams of fat seems awfully high, Marge? Oh, I don’t bother with that old-fashioned, indecipherable printed label anymore. I just look for the green dot and place all of my faith in the company that made the product, they wouldn’t lie to us.”

I am all for forcing food makers to label their products so we know what we are eating, I also advocate restaurants telling us the nutritional value of their menu items. But we are not five year olds.

Maybe food companies are behind this campaign so they can cover up what is really in the package. Use symbols so people won’t look at the printed nutritional labels. Eventually they won’t even print the nutritional labels anymore. They will just go down to the local stationary store and buy up a bunch of colored dots and slap them on the package instead.

“Hello, Local Stationary? Yeah, send over some more of those green dots. No, don’t bother with the red dots, sales on those items are down. That’s right, and throw in a few yellow ones just to make consumers think we are actually rating this stuff.”

Our education system is crap and outdated compared to the rest of the world and this illustrates why. The people who came up with this gem are products of that same education system. This scares the hell out of me.

We need to start teaching more real life subjects like food nutrition, money management, critical thinking, ethics and social skills (which should include a healthy dose of anger management). Something that will actually prepare us for the real world. More emphasis on current events, science and math would help a lot.

The FDA is tasked with protecting the public's health and safety from products created and sold in the U.S. market. It is a monumental undertaking by an organization that is understaffed facing a mountain of new products every year. Drugs and food items are submitted to the FDA along with results of testing conducted by the manufacturer of these same products. This system is inherently flawed, as evidenced by this example. There are a host of other examples we hear about, only after the product has been on the market and usually after peoples lives have been damaged or lost.

If you leave it to food conglomerates to come up with their own labeling they will use cheery, cartoonish symbols designed to catch the consumers eye. Use of these labels will lead to abuse and consumers still will not be any better informed than they were with the printed labels.

The FDA cannot save everyone from themselves but they can treat those of us who actually use our abilities to read to think for ourselves about what is nutritious if we only had a definitive guide of what levels of nutrition we need.

The claims that organic food is best for us have been so skewed by companies jumping on the bandwagon with products that cannot possibly be organic that we don’t know what is best for us.

We hear claims that studies show that such and such causes cancer or organ damage and then we hear contradictory studies that ‘prove’ otherwise.

Vegans preach how eating only vegetables will give you a longer, healthier life. Meat eaters retort that humans have gotten stronger through eating meat. Studies can be found that contradict or prove both.

We consumers are alone in determining what is best for us to eat. We cannot count on the government to protect us. There are just too many untrustworthy people selling items with false claims. Sure, some companies get punished for their misconceptions but the tide is too great.

Using a bunch of brightly colored stickers and cartoon characters will not help us at all. They are only designed to sell, sell, sell.