Terms such as ‘farm to table’, ‘hand-made’ and ‘no sugar added’ can easily mislead consumers
Every year, the bucket of bullshit food claims, terms, labels — whatever you want to call them — gets fuller. This, of course, has been carrying on since words and food were around, but the more disconnected we’ve become from our food production, the easier it is for meaningless puffery to sway our choices. Here’s a small handful of such terms from the bucket o’ crud, which should raise your BS antenna, if it isn’t already twitching.
After all, what is the definition of farm? That’s something that needs a long good rethink. Are we talking a feedlot beef enterprise, an organic egg farm, farmed salmon, industrial soya production? It’s all called farming, isn’t it? Maddening and unfair to those who are actually doing what the term implies, but sadly, if you see those words, questions need to be asked.Terms that have always been as nowhere as “factory fresh” .
How were the potatoes farmed? And now that hands have been brought up, are those “hands” happy? Are those workers for whom hands is a terrible sort of synecdoche, and which would not have Marx munching happily on said crisps , getting their digits cut or their palms burnt? Hand is used to imply small-scale operation. Implication again; nothing actually stated. But when supermarkets and multinational brands can use this term, perhaps some legislation needs to change. The same goes for the entirely co-opted word artisanal, which requires a whole book of bylaws to protect the innocent. Here’s one that really needs banning; it plays so dangerously near to “no sugar” in our minds. The label relies on our nutritional ignorance.
Your body doesn’t care where the molecules are coming from. When I see “no added sugar”, I know that, most of the time, this product has higher sugar levels than a parallel product maintaining silence on the matter.
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