Packaging

[supergee]

“100% cheese” doesn’t have to be 100% cheese

Thanx to andrewducker

Comments

[johnpalmer]

I dunno - additives in tiny quantities seem like a fair thing. If the ingredients are "Parmesan cheese and cellulose to prevent caking" then if I was on the jury, "well, we didn't *charge* them for the cellulose" would be a fair defense... if the additives were less than 1%, in fact, I'd feel "okay, so we rounded up!" would be an absolute defense.

Now, if it was cheese, and 5% nutritional yeast (because the latter was cheaper and didn't make a major change to the flavor), then I'd say that the label was fraudulent. And yeah, the court is suggesting a ruling contrary to reality, but remember, it's a legal doctrine. It was decided that tomatoes were legally a vegetable because of their uses - they are used like vegetables, so it's fair to assume the legislature wanted them taxed like vegetables - that, while humorous, is still a decent *legal* decision. It means the law is sometimes stone-cold stupid, but that's because it's in the service of the people - 'nuff said.

[arlie]

Drat this interface - when I try to reply to a specific comment, my reply generally attaches to the overall post. See below.

Defining

[marahmarie]

That's not what this is, so they need to amend and refile the lawsuit, because I'm tired of paying good money for crap:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-16/the-parmesan-cheese-you-sprinkle-on-your-penne-could-be-wood

Cellulose is a safe additive, and an acceptable level is 2 percent to 4 percent, according to Dean Sommer, a cheese technologist at the Center for Dairy Research in Madison, Wisconsin. Essential Everyday 100% Grated Parmesan Cheese, from Jewel-Osco, was 8.8 percent cellulose, while Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s Great Value 100% Grated Parmesan Cheese registered 7.8 percent, according to test results. Whole Foods 365 brand didn’t list cellulose as an ingredient on the label, but still tested at 0.3 percent. Kraft had 3.8 percent.

Kraft has 3.8% cellulose, and while that falls under the first sentence's vague and unsourced assertion that "an acceptable level" falls in the 2-4% range, Kraft is so bland I don't usually buy it. That leaves me to choose from other brands or store labels that might have even higher amounts of cellulose.

Not to mention "parmesan" is an entirely meaningless name: http://www.seriouseats.com/2016/08/best-parmesan-cheese-parmigiano-reggiano-labeling.html

In sharp contrast, Parmesan cheese in the United States and Argentina, another major knockoff producer, must abide by no such rules. It can be made from milk of any quality, age, or provenance. There is no aging requirement, or really any requirements at all—domestic Parmesan is not even vaguely defined as a particular type or style of cheese.

So it's just cellulose-stuffed "Well, it's a cheese" cheese!

[arlie]

The problem, of course, is if there's some reason a customer wants to avoid the unmentioned ingredient. Taken to an illogical extreme, your position suggests that a tiny % of some poison need not be mentioned. Or if not a poison, an allergen that provokes potentially fatal responses in a small number of people. And as you say, this is a *legal* decision; to me that means that common sense (or even common logic) is not required.

[johnpalmer]

Keep in mind, I'm *only* defending the label's claim that it's "100% grated cheese" (or whatever marketing phrasing they used) - if they failed to mention cellulose on the ingredients list, *that* should be grounds for legal action.

But if the label says, I dunno, 6 oz of cheese, and they sell you 6 oz of cheese, plus a bit of cellulose because they think you'll like the experience a bit better that way *and* they don't hide that they are doing so, then, they are selling you 6 oz of 100% grated cheese - plus something extra, which you may not want or like, but you can avoid if you check the ingredients.

If they gave you 5.5 oz of cheese and .5 oz of cellulose? That would be fraudulent - they said 100% cheese *and* 6 oz; 1/12th isn't a rounding error. 5.94 oz cheese and .06 cellulose, and they can say "hey, lots of people round up!" and... well, they *do*. Most folks wouldn't call a newspaper story inaccurate for saying that there were five tons of garbage dumped illegally because it was only 4 tons, 1900lbs. That's a bit skeevier, but not quite tortworthy IMHO.

And, as you point out, if they failed to list an ingredient, that should get them in deep trouble with regulators plus maybe also be fraudulent, depending on intent.

(I say "should" in the sense of "in a just world, it would happen", but in GOP-world, you can have reasonable safety, or you can have deregulation which they claim will create jobs, and probably won't... not both! (NB: in GOP world, it's not a choice YOU get to make, of course!))

Anyway: I think we're probably in agreement in most areas. People should know that they can find everything noteworthy in their food in the ingredients list. But marketing should allow for some level of embellishment, so long as the truth is laid out for anyone who wants to know it.

[arlie]

The other problem, of course, is whether the ingredients list is legible - not only for someone with perfect (corrected) vision in perfect lighting, but for a person with some level of vision issues (not total blindness) in normal grocery store conditions. It's commonly written in quite small print - sometimes also low contrast and/or crumpled and/or hidden by other packaging or labelling elements. Can the ingredients be read after cataract surgery? Before cataract surgery? By someone who can't afford new eyeglasses as often as their prescription changes? By someone who's just a bit dyslexic?

My anecdotal experience is that I rarely get through a grocery trip without having difficulty reading something - though that's most often tags on the shelf, particularly the fine print identifying which package the rather larger-written price applies to. (And then there's unit pricing, where a given section generally has at least 3 different units used for differing products, making actual comparison require a calculator and probably a unit conversion table as well. All of those in the same hard to read font, often low enough I need to pretty much lie on the floor to read it.)

[marahmarie]

Same here, I can't read 9 out of 10 food or beverage labels without glasses (astigmatism), and for a fact I can't read the ingredient list on a Parmesan cheese bottle (or the unit pricing, most of the time) without my glasses, so I get what you're saying (not so much lying on the floor as holding the item out at a weird angle and away from me, or with unit pricing, hunching down to get the shelf label more at eye level, then turning my head in all kinds of ways to find the right light and angle).

If something identified as 100% something is not, they should list it on the front of the label in a font/color/with contrast that makes it easy to find and read. But this gets me off onto a whole tangent about accessibility in labeling, which is pretty much MIA.

[arlie]

*sigh* The judge is full of bovine byproducts. Cheese that's whole - in its wax - keeps just fine outside of a fridge. D'oh. Given the educational standards and commercial obfuscation in this country, I wouldn't expect a consumer to know that - any more than the judge and/or journalist did, given the phrasing in the article. But I also wouldn't expect them to know that additives make grated cheese less likely to spoil; having encountered ultra-pasteurization, my best guess when faced with grated cheese outside the cooler section would be ultrapasturization, not the addition of cellulose. (FWIW, even given the article, I still don't believe that adding cellulose acts as a preservative. Anti-caking sounds plausible though.)

OTOH, I thought misleading product names were 100% legal in the US of A. Whether it's an alternate spelling of "chicken" that "obviously" excuses the product from containing meat, or a new name for an old fish, presumably designed to avoid existing (and perhaps well founded) prejudice against it, I read all the ingredient lists, and hope that nothing I care about was quite legally left out of those lists. My housemate wound up vomitting when she failed to check a "juice"s ingredients - she's intolerant of rape seed (canola), and the so-called juice contained canola oil. We both reject a lot of foods for "vegetable oil", "spices," and "a and/or b and/or c and/or d". And eating out is somewhat of a nightmare - just how much sugar is in a seemingly savoury dish (stew, perhaps), and is it enough to upset my pre-diabetic body? Is there canola oil in that stew? Etc.