Marketing gimmicks and the
ruthless rush for profits have stolen the meaning of local and many other food
labels
By FRANK
CARINI/ecoRI News staff
Many food labels have moved
away from honesty and are now largely a tool to promote self-identification
with some righteous world view: you are more ethical, or care more about your
children or the planet, if you buy this or that label. Consumers often end up
paying more for a gross exaggeration. (Genetic Literacy Project)
The local food movement, through no fault of its own, is now
defined by words and phrases that aren’t as friendly as they sound, or even
accurate. Advertising agencies, multinational corporations and greed have
stolen the meaning of “local.”
In the name of higher CEO pay and greater profit, overworked and
underpaid consumers have been left to untangle what “local” and other labels,
such as “natural,” “free range,” “grass fed,” “cage free” and “artisan,”
actually mean.
Subway, the fast-food chain that, until recently, used a chemical, azodicarbonamide, found in shoe rubber,
synthetic leather and yoga mats in its bread manufacturing, noted in TV
commercials earlier this year that its sandwiches are “handmade.” Sounds great,
but what does that actually mean?
Absolutely nothing.
The Kraft Foods Group, a global food power, was awarded permission
to use the academy’s “Kids Eat Right” healthy label to better market its
fake cheese to parents. The deceptive marketing stunt quickly failed, thanks to
public backlash, and the bogus label was removed from the faux cheese.
Food labels are designed with profits, not environmental protections,
animal welfare, public health, authenticity or the truth, in mind. They’re
abused as marketing tools to cheat consumers and genuine businesses. That
wasn’t their original intent.
When the food-labeling movement began, in the 1970s in California,
it was intended to let consumers know that their produce wasn’t tainted with
herbicide and pesticide residue. Back then, buying food certified with the
California Organic Standard meant you were an “earthy-crunchy, bean-sprout and
granola-eating hippy.” It also meant you were in a small percentage of
consumers worried about chemical use in food production.
By the late 1980s, however, when reports about a possible
cancer-causing chemical manufactured by the Uniroyal Chemical Corp. — now the
Chemtura Corp. — and used on apples went public, the number of concerned
consumers grew.
Alar, a growth-regulating hormone, was sprayed on apples from
the early 1960s to the late ’80s, to hold them on the tree longer and reduce
bruising. In 1989, it became illegal to use the chemical on U.S. food crops,
but it’s still allowed for use on non-food crops.
A decade later, when multinational food manufactures such as
General Mills and Coca-Cola discovered “organic,” “farm raised” and
“old-fashioned” produced profits, there was an explosion of food labels
claiming this or promising that.
These global behemoths, and others, started buying up organic
companies to diversify their portfolios, and, since then, the labeling of food
has been trivialized. Deceptive labeling practices are now being committed by
all types of producers, large and small.
The food critic for the Tampa Bay Times recently conducted a two-month investigation of Tampa’s farm-to-table restaurants,
tracking down their sourcing claims. Many turned out to be bogus. Blackberries
from Mexico and blueberries from California aren’t Florida local. She also
discovered “Florida blue crab” comes from the Indian Ocean.
It’s important to make consumers aware that the definition of
local is muddy and often misused, according to Karen Schwalbe, executive
director the Southeastern
Massachusetts Agricultural Partnership.
Lots of signage and
labeling that says ‘local’ doesn’t guarantee a product is, especially in the
honey business where fraud is rampant and verification nearly nonexistent. The
owner of Rhode Island-based Aquidneck Honey told ecoRI News last year that he
gets all of his honey from hives in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut
and New York. (ecoRI News)
Costly wording
Food labeled “local” is largely taken for granted by consumers,
despite the fact that they can be buying, often at a premium, something that
isn’t actually being produced locally and/or using local ingredients.
So who is keeping tabs on the local label? No one. It’s largely up
to consumers to find out if labeling claims are true. It’s not an easy task.
The U.S. honey market, for example, is riddled with corruption and
fraud, according to one of the country’s top pollen researchers. Vaughn Bryant, director
of the Texas A&M University Palynology Laboratory and Paleoethnobotany
Laboratory, told ecoRI News in early March that most of the honey sold in the
United States and Canada isn’t what is printed on the label.
 |
| A Texas A&M University researcher has found that most of the honey sold in the United States and Canada isn’t what is printed on the label. All of the honey sold by Annie B’s Honey Farm is from a ‘200-mile radius,’ the owner told ecoRI News last year. (Annette Birman) |
“Consumers are getting screwed all over the place,” he said. “What
they’re paying for is not what they're getting.”
In southern New England, Jon Nelson, of B.B. Nelson Apiaries in
Woonsocket, R.I., has seen firsthand the deceptive labeling practices used by people he calls “packers.”
He
said these people buy what is commonly referred to as “bucket honey” — 60
pounds of honey in a 5-gallon pail — from distributors and pack it into jars
affixed with labels that claim the honey is local.
He knows this practice is commonplace because he sells bucket
honey to buyers in both Rhode Island and Massachusetts. He’s seen these pails
with the label removed and “Rhode Island Honey” written across the lid.
Consumers are tricked into paying a premium for repackaged bulk
honey labeled “local” that likely came from South America or China. The federal
government estimated that last year 91 million pounds of honey, much of it from
China, entered the United States illegally, according to Bryant.
The practice of creative labeling isn’t illegal in Connecticut,
Massachusetts or Rhode Island. Nothing in the Food and Drug Administration’s
convoluted labeling regulations addresses the shadiness of labeling distributor
honey “local.”
Bryant said he has been told by FDA officials that, despite
rampant labeling abuse, the federal agency doesn’t consider the problem a high
priority. Federal law only prohibits adding water or high-fructose corn syrup
to honey.
The Texas A&M researcher has spent the past four decades
testing honey from around the globe. He entered the world of honey in 1976,
when asked by the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of
Agriculture to examine domestic honey bought by the federal government as part
of its farm subsidy program. He’s been keeping tabs on the market ever since.
Several years ago, he and a colleague tested some 70 jars of honey
bought in big-chain stores in 12 different states and found only a few
contained what was actually printed on the label. His research has also found
that more than 75 percent of honey sold in the United States has had its pollen
filtered out.
Bryant has worked with lawyers in California, Florida and New
York, and with state agricultural departments in North Carolina and West
Virginia, all of whom have tried to enforce honey labeling laws. In court cases
against major food retailers that were accused of mislabeling honey, they lost
because judges noted that the FDA has no rules about truth in labeling for
honey, he said.
Naive consumers, willing to pay more for honey they believe was
harvested from, say, hives on Aquidneck Island or in Cumberland, R.I., to help
with springtime allergies, can end up buying marked-up honey made from bees in
China, North Dakota, Argentina or Brazil.
“Consumers are buying high-priced honey labeled orange blossom and
buckwheat for premium prices, and it’s absolutely junk,” Bryant said. “And they
have no recourse, because there are no laws or requirements when it comes to
labeling honey. It’s frustrating.”
ecoRI News asked Bryant what consumers can do to protect
themselves. His answer wasn’t encouraging: “I have no idea.”
Honey, however, is hardly the only product manipulated by creative
labeling.
Rhode Island’s largest egg producer boasts that it sells “eggs from local
hens.” While true, that rosy picture of farm life, which also makes use of the
label “natural,” fails to note that up to 10 hens live in wire containers, called
battery cages, that are about the size of a small oven. There’s nothing natural
about that arrangement.
Not all organic brands are
equal, as corporate giants have cornered the market. The cost to be labeled
‘organic’ is prohibitive for many small farms and the red tape is thick.
(Philip Howard, associate professor in Michigan State University’s Community,
Agriculture, Recreation and Resource Studies program)
Label makers
Consumers don’t know how much pesticide and herbicide is sprayed
on their food, or the amount of antibiotics and hormones injected into the meat
they consume. In 2014, according to the FDA, U.S. livestock operations used 20
million pounds of antibiotics, while doctors prescribed about 7 million pounds.
Many consumers don’t realize how much agribusinesses such as
Monsanto control their food supply. Labeling misuse only adds to consumer
confusion.
A 2015 Consumer Reports study found that nearly two-thirds of
shoppers are being misled to believe the label “natural” means more than it
does. As an example, the study noted that some “natural” shredded
cheese contains natamycin, a pesticide. “Natural” fruit snacks can contain
artificial preservatives such as sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate.
In fact, the label “natural” helps sell nearly $41 billion worth
of food in the United States annually, according to Consumer & Shopper Insights.
The FDA, though, doesn’t even have an official definition of what “natural”
means.
Dan Bensonoff, policy director for the Natural Organic Farmers
Association/Massachusetts, said the word “natural” is completely
meaningless when it comes to food. “There’s no rules around natural,” he said.
“It’s a challenge for consumers to know what all these labels mean.”
This growing, and largely unregulated, use of marketing labels is
propped up by politics and profit. Bensonoff noted that corporate pressure from
Big Ag has left labeling regulations loose.
For example, the label “free range” doesn’t mean chickens, pigs
and cattle enjoy their limited existence roaming lush-green pastures and sunlit
farmland. In fact, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) regulations for free-range certification apply only to poultry.
The USDA requires that “free-range” chickens and turkeys raised
for their meat have “access” to the outside. There is no requirement for access
to pasture; their outside access can be limited to dirt and gravel. There also
are no requirements for the size of an “outside range.”
There is no legal definition for “free-range” chicken eggs, and
the term doesn’t explain what an animal eats. It’s likely manufactured feed,
not bugs and grubs.
Many chickens labeled “free range” are raised quickly for profit,
in about seven weeks. For the first five weeks they’re not allowed outside, as
exercise would decrease the size of their breasts, which provide the more
popular white meat.
The terms “free range,” “pasture raised,” “grass fed” and “cage
free” are less husbandry terms and more advertising gimmicks.
“Grass fed” certification by the USDA doesn’t deal with the use of
hormones and antibiotics, confinement of animals or environmental stewardship.
“Cage free” simply means chickens can’t be raised in concentrated animal
feeding operations, such as battery cages.
A mass-produced mayonnaise is currently being hyped as being made
from “real ingredients,” such as cage-free eggs. Hellmann's is manufactured by
Unilever, a multinational consumer-goods company, and the product’s ingredients
include calcium disodium EDTA, which is also used in the textile and paper
industries, and natural flavors, the fourth-most common ingredient listed on
food labels.
In fact, the difference between natural flavors and artificial
flavors is slight. One (artificial) is synthetically processed in a laboratory
and one (natural) is purified in a laboratory.
In the expanding model of using labels to make money, the use of
the term “organic” is no less confusing. The designation also can be expensive,
for both producers and consumers. In fact, some organic farmers can’t even
afford to have their produce labeled “organic.” Major food manufacturers such
as Dean Foods, Kelloggs and Nestlé have little problem filing the reams of
paperwork needed to obtain federal organic certification.
Bensonoff said the red tape is a big reason why organic farmers
like him don’t seek the certification. “It’s a combination of factors, but the
paperwork is a concern,” he said. “Farmers also don’t want to be tied down with
a label, or don’t want a federal label they don’t believe is necessary.”
USDA “organic” products can be labeled differently depending
on the percentage of organic ingredients they contain. Products made entirely
with certified organic ingredients and methods can be labeled “100 percent
organic.” Products with at least 95 percent organic ingredients can use the
word “organic” — even if the other 5 percent was bathed in a concoction of
pesticides, herbicides, hormones and antibiotics. Both designations can display
the USDA organic seal.
A third category, containing a minimum of 70 percent organic
ingredients, can be labeled “made with organic ingredients.”
Much like the country’s cumbersome and loophole-ridden tax system,
the food-labeling system has been crafted with the help of special interests
and Big Business. The more confusing the better.
The solution? Have conversations with local food producers.
“Buy as close to home as possible,” Bensonoff said. “Get to know
your farmer. Visit and take a look around.”
Editor’s note: ecoRI News is holding a
panel discussion titled “The Dark Side of Local Food” that will address labeling and other issues associated with the
local food movement. The event is being held May 18 at AS220, 115 Empire St. in
Providence, and will feature panelists Cassie Tharinger, co-founder of the
Urban Greens Food Co-op; Ken Ayars, chief of the Rhode Island Department of
Environmental Management’s Division of Agriculture; Lisa Raiola, founder and
president of Hope & Main, Rhode Island’s first culinary business incubator;
Matt Tracy, of Red Planet Farm, which grows chemical-free vegetables in
Johnston, R.I.; and Jesse Rye, co-executive director of Farm Fresh Rhode
Island. Tickets cost $8. For more information, click here.