Academy of Sciences issued a report in 1988 pointing out that terms such as “lean” and “lite” are misleading. “Extra lite” doesn’t guarantee reduced calories. Under Federal rules the term may simply refer to a product’s color, flavor, or texture. “Lean” frozen dinners may use meat and other ingredients containing large amounts of fat.
While you may think you know what those magic words on food packages mean, you probably don’t, because those words have a special meaning that seems to be known only to the food manufacturers and the four government agencies that oversee food labeling and safety. For example, the word “enriched” means that vitamins, minerals, or protein have been added to the product, usually because these nutrients were eliminated from the food during processing. In other words, “enriched” simply means that the food is back where it started, nutritionally speaking, before it was processed. However, “fortified” means that vitamins, minerals, or proteins not originally removed or reduced during processing have been added as supplements, thus increasing the nutritional value the food had before it was processed.
As you probably guessed, there’s an exception to these meanings of “enriched” and “fortified,” and that exception is flour. Almost all the flour sold in supermarkets today is labeled “enriched,” because flour can be called “enriched” if the iron, niacin, thiamine, and riboflavin that were removed during processing are replaced. However, the zinc, fiber, copper, and other vitamins and minerals that were removed during processing don’t have to be replaced. So you want to buy “fortified” flour, not “enriched” flour, but the other food you buy should be “enriched” not “fortified.” Got that? Just when you thought you had their definitions straight, they still manage to confuse you, don’t they?
If you buy “dietetic” foods, you’d better be careful. According to current regulations, foods with such terms as “dietetic,” “diet,” “low calorie,” and “reduced calorie” on their labels must have either one-third fewer calories than the standard versions or fewer than 40 calories per 100-gram serving. The question, of course, is how many calories are in that standard version, whatever that may be. Moreover, some foods can be labeled “dietetic” and still have the same number of calories as the standard version, as long as they have a reduced sodium content. To top it all off, the calorie count on the label only has to be within 20 percent of the actual number of calories in the food. Thus, the frozen diet dinner that claims to contain only 200 calories can contain as few as 160 calories or as many as 240 calories; there’s no way you can know for sure.
So you skip the diet dinner and go for the “sugar free” or “sugarless” food, in the innocent belief that food labels mean what they say. Wrong again. “Sugar free” and “sugarless” simply mean that the food contains no sucrose, which is nothing more than ordinary table sugar. However, the food can contain honey, dextrose (which is corn sugar), fructose (which is fruit sugar), mannose, glucose, sorbitol, or any other of a number of sweeteners that contain just as many calories as sucrose. Isn’t that an interesting definition of “sugar free”? Don’t you think the food industry and the government should let you in on their private definitions of words, especially since it’s your health and waistline that are at stake? Remember, doublespeak is language that pretends to communicate but really doesn’t; it is language designed to mislead.
One of the most popular words in the food business these days is “natural.” Sometimes it seems as if everything sold in the supermarket is natural, including detergent, soap, shampoo, pet food, and candy bars. The meaning of the word “natural” is obvious, right? (If you answered “yes” to that rhetorical question, take a piece of paper and write a one-sentence definition of the word “natural” before you continue reading the rest of this discussion.)
In the food business, the word “natural” doesn’t mean anything. A food labeled “natural” or “all natural” can contain any number of chemicals, including flavor enhancers, thickeners, emulsifiers, and preservatives such as BHA and BHT. Does this list of ingredients agree with your written or unwritten definition of “natural”? The last time I looked, the dictionary definition of “natural” said something about “not artificial, synthetic, or processed,” but then maybe those government agencies and the food manufacturers don’t use the same dictionary you and I use. Maybe they use their own private dictionary, the one they write but forget to publish so you can read it.
In 1980, Consumer Reports magazine reported that “Langendorf Natural Lemon Flavored Creme Pie” contains no cream but does contain sodium propionate, certified food colors, sodium benzoate, and vegetable gum. When L. A. Cushman, Jr., who chairs American Bakeries Company, the Chicago firm that owns Langendorf, was asked about this label, he explained that the word “natural” modifies “lemon flavored” and the pie contains oil from lemon rinds. “The lemon flavor,” Mr. Cushman is quoted as saying, “comes from natural lemon flavor as opposed to artificial lemon flavor, assuming there is such a thing as artificial lemon flavor.”
Then there are “Pillsbury Natural Chocolate Flavored Chocolate Chip Cookies,” which contain, among other ingredients, artificial flavor and BHA. “We’re not trying to mislead anybody,” claimed a company representative, who explained that the word “natural” modifies only “chocolate flavored.” I guess you’d better brush up on the syntactic structure of modification if you want to be able to read food labels these days.
A great example of the doublespeak of food is the claim on the label that the product doesn’t contain something it wouldn’t contain anyway, a kind of negative doublespeak. For example, ajar of jelly or jam may have the words “no preservatives” on it. Since sugar is all the preservative jams and jellies need, they have never had preservatives added to them. The same is true for canned products, which are preserved by the heat of the canning process. So think twice before buying the can of corn or the jar of jelly just because it is labeled “no preservatives added.” You might also notice that these magic words are usually accompanied by that other magic word, “natural.”
The use of the word “natural” on products reached a certain degree of absurdity when Anheuser-Busch proudly advertised its newest line of beer, “Anheuser-Busch Natural Light Beer,” which the Miller Brewing Company derided, and then attacked. Miller correctly pointed out that beers are “highly processed, complex products, made with chemical additives and other components not in their natural form.” The fight between the two big brewers caused some concern in the beer industry. The Wall Street Journal quoted William T. Elliot, president of C. Schmidt & Sons, a Philadelphia brewery, as saying, “One thing they [other brewers] are worried about is all the fuss over ingredients. Publicity about that issue is disclosing to beer drinkers that their suds may include sulfuric acid, calcium sulfate, alginic acid, or amyloglucosidase.” So much for natural beer.
After eight years of trying to regulate advertising claims in-volving “natural foods,” the Federal Trade Commission decided in 1982 to give up. Companies are not required to make a calorie disclosure for foods that have such magic words as “energy,” “natural,” or “lite” on their labels. You’re on your own when you try to figure out what these words on any food label mean.
Deep-Chilled Chicken
Even that all-American food, chicken, can be the victim of deceptive labeling. You may have learned at one time that, at a temperature of thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, water and other things freeze. But chicken doesn’t freeze at that temperature, at least not according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the chicken processors, who consider processed chickens “fresh” not “frozen” if they have been chilled to twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. Bill Haffert, the editor of the trade journal Broiler Industry, said in 1981 that the industry term is “deep-chilling” and that such chickens have not been frozen but “deep-chilled” and can therefore be sold as “fresh” chickens. Maybe the people who thought up this doublespeak should be packed in ice and have their temperature lowered to twenty-eight
