Chemicals! Additives! Preservatives! Names I can't pronounce! Soy! Peanuts! Nutritionists sound so smart & confident! Exclamation Points! Get on with it!
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here's a growing trend amongst food product manufacturers & distributors, and it's setting a worse precedent than most consumers probably realize. That precedent is the dumbing down of the market place, and the consumers that drive it forward. And that precedent will come about because of what are effectively sugar-coating and patronizing marketing ploys to convince consumers that they're not putting "bad" ingredients in their food.
Even though it may not look the part, but you may not realize (even more than before) that these companies are still putting "bad" ingredients in your food.
So instead of reading "Sodium Hydroxide", which is a highly reactive alkali salt that isn't particularly safe (let alone healthy) for eating, a company could go with this ridiculous trend and call it "salt." To placate the ignorant masses who scoff at complex chemical designations that are often liable to twist your tongue, companies are simply printing "salt, tomato sauce, fruit sugar, etc." and calling it a day.
The "non-pronounceable" ingredient name for
Vitamin B12 is cyanocobalamin. But, as
this Food Insight newsletter explains, a significant portion of consumers read through ingredients list, and a number of those reconsider purchasing when they catch a glimpse of an ingredient whose name they cannot pronounce.
The FDA (The Food & Drug Administration, in-case you didn't know) rules that scientific labels for ingredients must be used. And it is a reasonable stipulation because if you just say "salt", you won't know exactly what kind of salt you're consuming. For all you know, what you're eating is a highly-reactive alkali salt rather than a tame, treated one like table salt. You wouldn't know because for one, if you are being suckered into this bullshit, you are being told not to buy foods whose ingredients you can't pronounce, and the companies are (regardless of how advertently they're doing it) insulting you with simplistic, euphemistic language.
Over god damn ingredient names, no less!
What's happening is that instead of consumers being responsible, skeptical, and most important of all, investigative on their own, companies are expected to do something to dampen the market-wide concern over ingredients in food. That something is, as mentioned, using soft, patronizingly layman language in order to convince consumers that something is being done about what they're buying. You think they give a rat's ass about quality? You better be dreaming if you think these companies do. It's widespread practice to cut corners and "save money" wherever a company thinks it's sensible. So if they have to use a product that is sold at a cheaper price in greater bulk, being synthetic (and easily thus easily produced), and requiring less yield on the part of the manufacturers, then these companies will take that route. You, the consumer, will be on the receiving end of the consequences of cheapness.
After all, why do you think so many poor people are obese? It's because people are eating a lot of shitty foods, with shitty ingredients, at jokingly low prices. It's a bargain priced ticket for an express-route to a swift(er) death. But hey, at least you can actually read the ingredients now!
After all, what would the lowly everyman do about trans-fatty acids that lead to cellular degradation over time? What would the gullible masses do about synthetics that shouldn't be circulating through the body in the first place?
Absolutely fuckin' nothin'!
| | | Now, idiot consumer, keep buying that god damn food you buy and shut the fuck up already, we're doing something to keep the complaints low. If only you knew how to read, stopped listening to nutritionists with bloated egos, and weren't intimidated by scientific jargon, you'd know your place, consumer! |
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