…will the “free market” take care of this anomaly? Fact is, the government isn’t doing a very good job of it, but private enterprise hasn’t really made buying food a very transparent process either. I feel perpetually duped buying food at the “natural health food store” here in town for this very reason. I want to know, very clearly, what “natural” means when it’s slapped as a label on to a food product. Advertising (and labeling) should be an act of persuasion not of deceit.
Erik Kain
Erik writes about video games at Forbes and politics at Mother Jones. He's the contributor of The League though he hasn't written much here lately. He can be found occasionally composing 140 character cultural analysis on Twitter.
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Testing. Report
I don't know – the term "natural" is susceptible to a lot of different meanings in this context. If the FDA is going to officially define it in a given way, then anyone who produces a product that meets that definition is naturally (ahem) going to slap it on their product. What the authors of that article want is for "natural" in that context to mean specifically and only "naturally raised," ie, free range – and most people know to look for "free range" when they want "naturally raised." To me, when I hear "natural" in that context, my understanding is simply that the meat isn't filled with chemical preservatives. There's not any real reason to expect the term to take on only it's most narrow possible meaning, either in a free market or otherwise. Report
I'd like to know how reliable the "organic" label is as well. Report
Not that reliable. But my feeling is that if you bother taking the effort to buy organics, it shouldn't take much more to do a bit of sourcing on who you're buying from. I wouldn't trust big-box organics, for instance, except insofar as I trust a given producer.
Of course, I often buy organic foods (like heirloom tomatoes or whole-grain breads) because they taste better, which is an entirely different issue. Report