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Wherever the baseline intelligence quotient of John Q. Public sits on an absolute scale, when we're discussing something as critical and universal as food distribution, it should be pretty easy to accept that, at a minimum, the median IQ should be accommodated. It should be easy for the consumer to understand what's in the food he's going to eat. Manually picking up every food item and reviewing the list of ingredients by hand in the middle of grocery store does not comport with this; this is a matter of efficiency more than a lack of the intellectual faculty to process a list of ingredients (though when half of those ingredients are impenetrable chemical names that only commercial food chemists understand, it makes even more sense to skip it). Lament the average consumer's lack of gross intelligence all you want, but the fact is that it's irrelevant in this circumstance. Food distribution should be accessible and understandable by nearly all adults, and if it's not, it's a systemic failure, not an individual one. This is especially true now that all of the food for sale in a typical grocery store is altered by chemists. This artificial manipulation should cause us to be more careful about food, not less. It is absolutely true that nearly every food item in the mainstream grocery store contains superfluous sugar, including foods that you wouldn't expect or think about. While many stores will carry one or two SKUs of a particular product without sugar, you have to be really careful to pick out the right one. For instance, canned pears come "in heavy syrup" (i.e., drenched in sugar) by default. They also offer pears in "light syrup" (i.e., sugar added). There are various combinations of heavy/light syrup canned pear offerings, and then, at the very back, you may luck out and find one can of pears "in water". These aren't Oreos -- people are buying canned fruits and vegetables because they are trying to be healthy, and the corporate grocers are pulling a fast one on them by dumping large helpings of sugar into everything to try to make the food more addictive (and thereby, increase sales). Corporate profiteering absolutely plays a massive role in the obesity epidemic. Discounting that is playing into their hands at the peril of public health. |
I don't know how the situation looks in the US, but in Europe, there's compulsory, standardized labels listing ingredients on every non-whole item. Whole foods are marked with the country/ies where it was produced, treated and packaged.
If it's considered too much effort to read a clearly laid-out sticker, the problem is definitely with people reaching an extreme kind of intellectual lazyness, which is why I don't understand the need to teach nutrition mentioned in other comments. Just read what's in the thing, dammit! If somebody doesn't understand that sugar has absolutely nothing to do in canned beans, well... I'm lost for words.
This means the actual problem is the complete disfunctionality of our educational systems. As you rightly point out,
> Corporate profiteering absolutely plays a massive role in the obesity epidemic.
and is easily countered by buying a tad more consciously than "I probably don't need this, but I'll buy it anyway just in case" or "I like the look of that" or "I've seen this in an ad, must be awesome", and then proceeding to throwing a quarter of your purchases away. As you might have guessed, I was not raised like that, and it utterly boggles my mind how some people can function that way. Apart from the food, it's a massive waste of money!
So yeah, the problem is, as always, education, because I don't see how foods could be marked any clearer than black-on-white stickers that take ten seconds to scan thouroughly for any unwanted ingredients.