Why food labeling doesn’t work

Food labeling doesn't work - at least with consumers, the ones who might benefit the most - because they don’t understand the labels.

The true secret of food labeling, however, is that the experts know this and new regulations are designed to target restaurants, not consumers. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 "requires restaurants and similar retail food establishments with 20 or more locations to list calorie content information for standard menu items on restaurant menus and menu boards, including drive-through menu boards," effective March 23, 2011 (FDA info here). They target restaurants that jack up the calorie count in their meals and the food manufacturers who add potentially hazardous ingredients and use deceitful labels. The FDA helps keep them honest.

So what would work with consumers? Something imposed from above like the UK's traffic lights (image below)? Or something simpler from independent evaluators like NuVal (lower image) which many US supermarkets like Kroger are adopting - broccoli scores 100, Cheetos a 5. There are other proposals around too, but for consumers, simpler is better.

FDA labels can be designed to harass, because harassment works. Think of what happened to smokers. No one changes their behavior without being pushed out of their comfort zone. Is this the Nanny State or a sincere attempt to roll back deceptive advertising and reduce allergies, obesity and diabetes? It’s really both.

But, do consumers change because of government labels? Consumers defend their eating habits for economic or ethnic or personal reasons and it’s not like people don’t know when they’re eating junk. Unfortunately change usually happens when someone in the family has a medical emergency.

If we really want to change consumer eating habits, it won’t come through food labeling; it will come through education - people figuring out what healthy diets actually are and enforcing them for themselves and their children. Fundamentally it means refusing sodas and packaged snacks and eating out less. Hopefully there are enough adults and kids figuring this out - that allergies, diabetes, high cholesterol and obesity are the canaries in the coalmine, signaling problems with our diets.

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For more background, the best food blog is Marion Nestle’s Food Politics. Or there's:

• California’s Prop 65 (The Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act) of 1986 (Pros and Cons here).
• The Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act (FALCPA) of 2004, which requires food manufacturers to disclose whether their products contain any of the top 8 food allergens (some good links at the FDA website here).
• California’s new menu-labeling laws which were enacted last year requiring restaurants to tell consumers the amount of calories, saturated fat, carbohydrates and sodium in each dish (starting in 2011, chain restaurants will have to print calorie information on their menus). Useful story here.
• For why the food industry cannot be trusted to self-regulate, the collapse of their Smart Choices program is chronicled here.