For a long time, I've been a foodie. Except for a brief spell in the inevitable starvation-diet phase that plagues teenage girls, I have always had a deep love for food - good food, not McDonalds and other food producers in that genre. I even went as far as trying my hand at studying nutrition. For the record, I didn't enjoy it. It was far too much about guilt, and not enough about enjoying what you ate. However, I did learn important things about reading labels and understanding what I ate. It became a real bug-bear of mine that food producers didn't put enough information on their labels to let the average Joe make an informed decision about eating it. Alternatively, they put how many grams of sodium and fat in tiny writing and don't tell you how it's going to affect you.
That brings me to the point. I was watching Jamie Oliver's TED Award speech the other day and realised anew that this is something that is really, actually a problem. So, a little while ago,I found myself walking through the aisle of the supermarket in search of Matzoh (being as how they're big enough that two with peanut butter is a sufficient breakfast). However, this being a small town, the shop had run out of the Kosher delight (yes, Big Bang Theory reference), so I started looking around for alternatives on the shelf and saw a few packets of Ryvita©. Now, I must admit to having very little brand loyalty; I simply picked it up because Mum used to buy it whenever she went on diet, and I remember it being the least offensive of her diet foods.
We'll fast forward through checkout to the moment when I took it out the shopping bag in my kitchen. It was then that I noticed the wonderful thing: a nutritional label. Now, this was not just any nutritional label - there it was, on the front of the pack, proudly announcing the values of various things in the crackers and their percentage of recommended daily intake. I was stunned and delighted. Having written an impassioned essay in an exam on the need for decent food labels, the sight made my heart sing. I will concede at this point that I may have a problem with dorkiness, but it blew me away.
It was a wonderful thing to be able to decide how many I could have without having to convert the information on the packet into percentages-by-calorific-value. It got me thinking: why don't more companies do that? Okay, Ryvita© is marketed to dieting women (and, thus, their target market is very aware of everything they put in their mouths), but hear me out. Why do food companies force us to do our own research? If you want to make good choices, you have to read diet books (and wade through the horse s**t that most of them spout), use resources like the GoodGuide site, or the nutritional data site in order to find out what you need to know.
Maybe they realise that, if people knew what they were putting in their mouths, they wouldn't buy the product. I don't, however, think that's a valid argument for two reasons. 1) Most people don't care enough to read labels, and 2) Isn't it their ethical duty to let people know they're killing themselves? That brings us back to my (admittedly idealistic) view that you should let people do what they want, provided they know what the risks are (although that opinion does not extend to "warning: hot liquid may cause burns" on a coffee cup. If you're too dense to work out that hot coffee hurts your skin, you deserve to learn the hard way). So maybe I'm expecting too much from an imperfect world, but I would like to *hi5* whoever designed the labels atThe Ryvita© Ccompany. Thank you for making our food shopping easier!
That brings me to the point. I was watching Jamie Oliver's TED Award speech the other day and realised anew that this is something that is really, actually a problem. So, a little while ago,I found myself walking through the aisle of the supermarket in search of Matzoh (being as how they're big enough that two with peanut butter is a sufficient breakfast). However, this being a small town, the shop had run out of the Kosher delight (yes, Big Bang Theory reference), so I started looking around for alternatives on the shelf and saw a few packets of Ryvita©. Now, I must admit to having very little brand loyalty; I simply picked it up because Mum used to buy it whenever she went on diet, and I remember it being the least offensive of her diet foods.
We'll fast forward through checkout to the moment when I took it out the shopping bag in my kitchen. It was then that I noticed the wonderful thing: a nutritional label. Now, this was not just any nutritional label - there it was, on the front of the pack, proudly announcing the values of various things in the crackers and their percentage of recommended daily intake. I was stunned and delighted. Having written an impassioned essay in an exam on the need for decent food labels, the sight made my heart sing. I will concede at this point that I may have a problem with dorkiness, but it blew me away.
It was a wonderful thing to be able to decide how many I could have without having to convert the information on the packet into percentages-by-calorific-value. It got me thinking: why don't more companies do that? Okay, Ryvita© is marketed to dieting women (and, thus, their target market is very aware of everything they put in their mouths), but hear me out. Why do food companies force us to do our own research? If you want to make good choices, you have to read diet books (and wade through the horse s**t that most of them spout), use resources like the GoodGuide site, or the nutritional data site in order to find out what you need to know.
Maybe they realise that, if people knew what they were putting in their mouths, they wouldn't buy the product. I don't, however, think that's a valid argument for two reasons. 1) Most people don't care enough to read labels, and 2) Isn't it their ethical duty to let people know they're killing themselves? That brings us back to my (admittedly idealistic) view that you should let people do what they want, provided they know what the risks are (although that opinion does not extend to "warning: hot liquid may cause burns" on a coffee cup. If you're too dense to work out that hot coffee hurts your skin, you deserve to learn the hard way). So maybe I'm expecting too much from an imperfect world, but I would like to *hi5* whoever designed the labels atThe Ryvita© Ccompany. Thank you for making our food shopping easier!
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