What’s Really in Your Food?

[babylonsister]

What’s Really in Your Food?
by Suzanne Nelson

Food labels were designed to earn our trust. Since 1990, the Food and Drug Administration has required manufacturers to list the ingredients of their products, and more recently, “Nutrition Facts” boxes appear on everything from cereal to chewing gum.

But as more Americans attempt to make healthy choices about what they put in their bodies, it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to discern how our food was grown, processed and treated-thanks to our collective support of a food industry that wields its heft and political clout to create labeling laws that make a mockery of disclosure.

This is a story about a regulatory system increasingly friendly to the notion that consumers aren’t smart enough or sufficiently informed to make the “right” choices-an idea the food industry uses to justify the argument that obfuscating the information on food labels serves some undefined public good. It’s also about what happens to our food when industry attempts to achieve economies of scale to meet our expectations that a bag of organic lettuce mix should cost the same as a Yoo-hoo and carry almost as long a shelf life-not to mention our willingness to believe that everything edible constitutes food.

It’s also a story about nomenclature. At some undetectable moment in recent history, modern food parlance parted ways with common standards of forthrightness and left us in an up-is-down world where food manufacturers may soon be able to subject food to ionizing radiation and call it “cold pasteurization,” where “chocolate” may not have to actually contain cocoa and almonds labeled “raw” must be sprayed with a suspected human carcinogen.

In this world, makers of an artificial bovine hormone to increase milk production have used their leverage with regulators to bully dairies that don’t use the hormone into cowering away from disclosing on their labels why consumers might want to avoid it. In this world, it is easier and more cost effective to unleash a mix of genetically modified viruses on lunchmeat for children’s sandwiches rather than clean up filthy slaughterhouses. In this world, it is increasingly challenging for consumers desiring to make healthier choices to know which way to turn.

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http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/11/4481