In Food Label Wars, Both Sides Hide the Facts

Neither Agribusiness nor government wants you to know what's in the food you buy.

by Heidi Stevenson

21 June 2010

In the European Union, a battle has been waged between the forces of evil, Agribusiness, against the forces of evil, government agencies. Both sides want to control what goes on food labels. Agribusiness won, and it's being called a defeat for consumers. The truth, though, is that consumers lose no matter which side wins. Neither wants to tell the public what's really in the foods bought in stores.

People in the US need to listen up, too. This same battle is being fought in the States. It really doesn't matter who wins—because you still end up the loser—and the real issues aren't even discussed.

Traffic Light Labeling Gets the Red Light

At issue is a color-coding system that would require the addition of stoplight colors on labels to indicate whether healthy amounts of four ingredients are included. For example, if an unhealthy amount of saturated fat is included, then a red circle would be displayed. If the ill-informed nanny official considers the quantity low enough to be healthy, then the product would gain a green circle for that item. And, of course, if it couldn't be determined whether it's healthy, then it would rate a yellow circle. Items considered for this system include sugar, fat, saturated fat, and salt.

Readers of Gaia Health know how absurd such a system is. The very idea of focusing on four items, three of which are perfectly healthy, with sugar as the only exception, is simply absurd.

This is the system that Agribusiness successfully fought in the EU. They fought long and hard. Member of European Parliament, Struan Stevenson of Scotland, stated:

The lobbyists have now penetrated the inner sanctum of the MEPs and they're walking into our offices very often without any appointments at all. People are objecting to that and saying we should have more control about where lobbyists are allowed to go. But on this issue there are armies of them. I've never seen anything like it.

What's Wrong With Traffic Lights?

It's part and parcel of the modern view of health to break things down to their smallest elements and treat them as separate units. Thus, rather than look at food as consisting of a whole, such as broccoli or chicken, it's being treated as a bunch of parts deemed to be nutrient elements.

This becomes necessary in Agribusiness, because the bulk of stuff termed food is really only one thing: corn. This ubiquitous stuff has been processed every conceivable way, with new methods being developed every day to fool the palate. It doesn't really amount to food, so it's broken down into arbitrary parts that sound like they're nutritional elements.

Of course, much is missing, like the real nutrients that have been removed or were never there in the first place because of corrupt methods of growing the stuff. These missing things are synthesized in manufacturing plants and added, and the foodstuff is deemed to be fortified. Naturally, the public agencies supposedly advocating for your health insist on it.

All of this processing needs to be hidden. Whether the food is considered junk or healthy, the truth is that it's all junk. That's what the public is not supposed to see.

What's Really Going On?

So, the industry has become masterful at redirection and obfuscation. The truth is that Agribusiness wins either way. The real issue, just exactly what's actually in food and where it comes from, is not even being addressed. It's a masterful twisting of reality, so that huge amounts of effort and struggle go into an essentially pointless, and tragically wrongheaded, effort.

We need to know what's in our food. That doesn't mean how much saturated fat or salt. It means simply what the ingredients are. Food is not a conglomeration of chemicals. It's a combination of ingredients.

An ingredient isn't a nutritional factor of a food. It's the living and dead things that come together to form a product.

At home, a meal is made from a few items, things like butter, broccoli, eggs, and so forth. If it's a purchased product, then it probably also includes a bunch of other far less appetizing things, such as monocalcium phosphate, monostearate, polysorbate 60, propylene glycol, and you get the idea. These are not from natural things, or if they are, they've lost any sense of it. They're chemicals.

We need to know about other ingredients, such as pesticides, bovine growth hormone, and other products used in the production of foodstuff.

We need to know how foodstuff is processed, because that changes the nature of it. We need to know where food originates and how it travels. Did that "local" produce get shipped overseas for processing, get sealed gas-filled packaging, and shipped to yet another place for long-term storage? Because they change the nature of food, those are also ingredients in foodstuff.

Agribusiness, Masters of Redirection

None of these true ingredients has been the focus of the traffic light battle. Instead, massive amounts of time and money have been marshalled to a battle for making it simple for people to believe they know what's in their food. The reality, though, is that everything that really matters in terms of food is ignored.

We're treated to news media stories giving the impression that Agribusiness has won a great battle against the forces of good. The reality, though, is that Agribusiness wins simply by the existence of a senseless battle. Attention and effort is redirected away from the real issues. Agribusiness gets to continue their obscene scorched earth factory farming, sterilization, irradiation, genetic modification of food, and devastation of the environment.

And we're left with or without red, yellow, and green circles on labels.

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