BET YOU a big fat doughnut that you are more confused this week about food labelling than you were last week.
Full-page adverts from Sainsbury’s introduced its colour-coded “wheel of health” system while leading food manufacturers unveiled their guideline-daily-amount (GDA) labelling “to help consumers understand what’s in their food at a glance”.
All of this comes ahead of the Food Standard Agency’s proposed traffic-light scheme for food labelling, which is still in the pipeline.
It is, of course, a pre-emptive strike by the food industry, which needed to put its system in place before being ambushed by the FSA scheme. The prospect of an FSA-style red blob on many products is a compelling reason for some food companies to develop an alternative system that tells it like it is, but just not in quite such stark terms.
We can’t avoid seeing a red blob. “At a glance” actually means that most of us will be fumbling for our specs before we get the full picture and even then, with percentage GDAs, we’ll have to resort to a calculator to work out our rations for the day.
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Food labelling is regarded in some quarters as a magic wand that will significantly slow soaring obesity rates. This belief is based on a dangerous assumption that if people know something is bad for them, they won’t eat it.
Oh really? The news from the United States, which has had the best food-labelling system on the planet in place for a decade, is not encouraging. Americans have continued to balloon in size, despite labelling. The truth is probably that the already healthy will read the labels while those who should be healthier will ignore them.
Not that the labels will be easy to understand for anyone. Different systems will make direct product comparison impossible. And although the food industry has a standard set of values that the manufacturers will use to make their GDA packet calculations, there’s nothing to stop them using a totally different (and more favourable) set if they want.
A further problem is policing. If a label says the product contains 25 per cent of GDA for fat, we have to take it on trust that it’s correct. Trading standards officers can verify these claims but they are already hard-pressed. In the past, additional funds for food-work passed to local authorities by the FSA have not been ringfenced and, if local councils would rather spend this on social services, they can and have.
For public confidence, the FSA urgently needs to commission and pay for key trading standards authorities, which have large food manufacturers on their “patch”, to test the accuracy of the GDA calculations. Otherwise, the label “cynical” will continue to be attached to most of us.