This post started out in the web log, and then I thought, "Say, if I can add a few more words, maybe people in the food industry will see it." The personal experience that went into this post owes most to those who distribute canned chili through Wal-Mart: Sam's Choice, Hormel, Southgate, Wolf, Armour, Bush's Beans, and especially the pricier one that starts with C, I forget the name because I didn't bring home any labels on which it was printed...
Would some other format for "food warning labels" help you make better food choices? Eww. Ick. Nanny go home! Who ever assumed that you need to make better food choices? How did they know what your food choices are, or how or why you make them?
For those who may not already know: If you have enough strength to do what you set out to do, generally feel cheerful--though not necessarily talkative--when you wake up in the morning, and don't feel aware of any specific part of your body, you are probably making good food choices. If not, it's worth exploring other food choices, but don't assume that what works for someone else will necessarily help, or even not hurt, you. Don't try to sell wheat to me because it's a nutritious food for you. Don't go gluten-free because I'm a celiac. Only you can make your own healthy choices about anything.
What would help? The only information that needs to be added to food warning labels is whether GMO or "pesticides" are likely to render the food toxic. The list of food ingredients should be the target, if we want to help adults make better food choices. (This cause is not served by taking any approach that it might occur to us to use when talking to small children.)
Apart from not including toxic chemicals sprayed on soil, plant stems, or actual food, which should be included, existing lists of food ingredients tend to be printed in small type, sometimes hidden in the folds or overlaps of labels, and often in colors other than black and white, all of which make the list impossible for many shoppers to read. Many people actually see better at the middle distance (five to ten feet ahead, as when walking) without the glasses they use for reading, so they don't wear glasses in the store. They may use magnifying glasses to read, especially if New Roundup has been sprayed in the area recently, but they don't carry those to the store, either.
Personally, my preferred font is still 8-point Times New Roman, comparable in readability to 12-point sans serif fonts but more aesthetically appealing...except after a spray poisoning incident, when 12-point type looks like 8-point to me and 8-point type just blurs through the fog of tears that cover my eyes until rain washes the poison vapors away. There are now days when I need a magnifying glass to read the type I normally read all day. This is not an effect of age. It is a very specific, temporary, recurring reaction to some chemical vapors in the air. Anyway this, plus selling books, has sensitized me to the way other middle-aged and older people shop.
How do they, or we if I've been poisoned during the week before a given shopping trip, know if food contains wheat, soy, corn, milk, or whatever else they need to avoid? They don't. They just assume they can't eat it, and don't buy it, when the product might be safe but they can't see the list of ingredients.
The best bargain on meat these days is Sam's Choice canned chicken. They label it "white meat" with "may include dark meat" in smaller type, which I think is tacky, but I'm not Jewish. I pick out the bits that show pink for the cats, cook the rest with rice and veg, and try to spoon all the veg into my dish and most or all the meat into the cats' dish. Anyway, it's the best price for the best standard of quality (not that every single can is fit to eat) on the market these days. Word has got about and it's hard for Wal-Mart to keep this simple, relatively healthy, food product on their shelves.
So I considered some alternatives. I liked salmon, before it was genetically modified. I like mackerel when the price is right; in recent years it's been unreasonable. I like a whole natural chicken, or large part of one, if another human is there to share it; otherwise the cats are likely to leave bits on the ground and attract less desirable animals. I like eggs, but transportation and cooking can create problems with buying eggs. I'm not keen on red meat; this is a preference, not a rule of ritual purity, so I don't mind precooked beef. This reminds me that, if I'm looking at canned chili, several brands of chicken and turkey chili are available these days.
So, which brands claim to be beef, chicken, or turkey in the sense of flavor, but actually contain more pork? That's a marketing dodge these days, when so many people don't want to eat pork. Gwaltney-Smithfield now sell "Traditional" chicken sausages--hot dogs, bologna, breakfast sausage--that contain more oink than cluck. Traditional sausage was made from pork, so they have an excuse for besmirching that word. Traditional chili was always and only made from beef, yet several brands of canned chili are made from pork. First I exclude the oink and then, of course, everything has to be wheat-free.
I don't want to try too many new things in one week, of course. Glyphosate is not listed on the label--as any "pesticide" to which foods have been exposed should certainly be. If I take home a sample of something sold at the price of human food, I eat a teaspoonful of it and watch for the mood swing that indicates a glyphosate reaction. If I suddenly feel irritable, within an hour or so, I take charcoal and give the rest of the food to the possums. Glyphosate probably harms possums too; they just don't live long enough, or get close enough to me, for me to notice. Anyway there's that money wasted on an animal that would have just as short a life expectancy, look just as ugly, and smell just as nasty, on a diet of dung and carrion. So I certainly don't want to take home a can of chili with wheat or pork in it.
Southgate chili is the cheapest brand. There are probably reasons for this that I don't want to know about, but Southgate chili tests safe.
Sam's Choice chili beans are even cheaper. They contain chili pepper and spices, but no meat. I like them. The cats eat them, but after eating them one of the cats nonverbally told me she could hardly keep them down. Sam's Choice chili "with beans" (and also with meat) is made from pork.
What about all the other brands? A lot of the different flavors on the shelf are Hormel. Hormel prints lists of ingredients in tiny black letters on a red background. When not reacting to chemical vapors I can read those lists, but it takes time for my astigmatic eyes to unfocus from the shelves and other shoppers in the store enough to be able to focus on that tiny print. If I've been exposed to chemical vapors it's hopeless.
Armour chili used to contain wheat...thirty years ago. They've changed the labels and the flavors available since then. Don't ask me what they've changed to. I'm not inclined to make myself as conspicuous as some shoppers do, standing in the aisle and nattering at a friend, waiting for my eyes to re-focus. Don't ask me about the probably better-quality brands either. I take a few cans of Southgate chili and get out of there, before a knot of two or three other shoppers starts occupying that part of the aisle and talking about their medical test results. Days when I have trouble reading labels always seem to be days when other people have trouble, too, and while they're passing time they don't talk about jobs, children, or football any more; they talk about the way their symptoms of chronic diseases flared up this week. It's hard to believe the way the companies try to gaslight people about this.
What I want to see on those cans of chili: About half the label contains the brand logo and the photographed "serving suggestion." The other half is white paper, on which is printed, in black ink, at least 10-point Times Roman or 16-point sans serif, a list of all ingredients in each can of chili, including all preservatives and "pesticides."
Monosodium glutamate is a flavor enhancer that makes some people ill. I've never had a noticeable reaction to MSG, but I'd like to see it clearly identified for the benefit of those who do. Because MSG is a chemical not a food, there are lots of different ways it can be "made," or isolated, from any kind of food, from some plant parts that are not used as food, or from kerosene. It is the chemical that makes potatoes savory. It's found in even higher concentrations in a seaweed called ajinomori, which is said to mean "father of flavors" in Japanese. The easiest way to add MSG to food is to grind a bit of dried ajinomori over a dish. Cheaper and more common processes involve burning rejected, usually rotten, foods and cooking the ashes...nobody wants to know. These different processes make it legal for manufacturers to list MSG on labels as things like "hydrolyzed protein" if it's derived from grains or beans, "natural flavors" if from potatoes, "sodium caseinate" if from cheese, or "spices." I think they should be required to list every individual spice used and to specify, after every alternative name used for MSG, "(MSG)".
What I hope not to see on food labels is any more condescending "eat this not that" directives that ignore the reality that healthy eating is a balance among many different hereditary and environmental factors, so one person's "healthy diet" is toxic to another person. Hello? I am a celiac. I spent thirty years growing sicker and sicker on "health food." Start telling me how much fat or sugar or whatever else you imagine would be "good for me" if you want to see how much ice cream I can sit down outside the store and eat in your face. Even if you were Grandma Bonnie Peters, which you're not. So just don't let what you have in the way of a mind start thinking that way, nanny.
GBP knew personally, and liked, a good cook whose Seventh-Day Adventist mannerisms affected me like itching powder: Vicki Griffin. She made videos discussing how badly elementary school students did after eating Fritos and Mountain Dew for breakfast, how they improved when offered whole-wheat toast and an apple instead. Right. Here's how that works in the real world: Mountain Dew is caffeine in a debittered, fruit-flavored form that does not have to be drunk all at once while it's hot. In fact, Mountain Dew tastes better when it's cold. It replaces coffee, not fruit, on the breakfast table and should not be considered as food at all. And nobody ate Fritos for their nutrient content until glyphosate-contaminated produce clogging the supermarkets drove some of us to get most of our nutrition from chickweed, which is low enough in calories that, yes, a person living mainly on chickweed does need the fats and carbs in Fritos. (Though during those years Fritos weren't safe, either, and such nutrients as I didn't get from chickweed I got from peanuts for a year or two.) But, if a person who chooses Fritos and Mountain Dew for breakfast happened to have found some glyphosate-free vegetables to eat the day before, the Fritos and Mountain Dew would have their intended mechanical effects on the digestive process and allow the person to get the nutrients from the vegetables. Glyphosate in the wheat toast and the apple would, on the other hand, upset the digestive process and prevent the person from getting any nutrients from vegetables, toast, or apple. So, until we get glyphosate out of the food supply, Fritos and Mountain Dew is a better breakfast than whole-wheat toast and an apple...even if people are not celiacs and might thrive on unsprayed wheat. That's not to say that either Fritos and Mountain Dew, or sprayed-wheat toast and a sprayed apple, is a good breakfast. Both of them are extremely low in usable nutrients. But Fritos and Mountain Dew are less immediately toxic than the wheat and the apple. A lot of things that people of Vicki Griffin's and my age learned about nutrition when we were younger, and even found to be true when we were younger, simply are not true for most of America today.
Government needs to move away from any suggestion of endorsement for one-size-fails-to-fit-all diet plans, and JUST make sure that foods are accurately labelled with their actual contents.
"Ooohhh, ooohhh, but when we just put the estimated amount of various nutrients on food labels people didn't know how much they ought to be getting, and when we just put the minimum daily requirement people thought that was the target level not to be exceeded, and when we just put the average daily amount of each nutrient recommended people thought..."
Well, maybe that's as it should be, because only a nutritionist who has studied the patient's diet, exercise, DNA, bloodwork, medication history, and current condition has any business telling anyone how much of any nutrient they need! People need to listen to their bodies. How much fat interferes with your digestion? How much sodium makes you thirsty, sluggish, or hypertensive? Is cow's milk a food or a poison for you? That kind of information can't be printed on food labels. And, what's more beyond that, the amount of specific nutrients found in raw ingredients varies widely; some carrots are loaded with beta-carotene and some are not. Trying to estimate the beta-carotene content of a package of frozen carrot slices is a total waste of time. All food labels should tell us is what kind of fat, sodium, cow's milk, and whatever else is in the food.
The news about the proposed new labels was reported at washingtonpost.com, which this web site does not recommend because of the paywalls, and is summarized at the bottom of this news roundup:
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