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It's goes back even further. Artificial dyes already had bad reputations by the late 70s. In the mid-late 70s labels on foods and cleaning products told you ex

It's goes back even further. Artificial dyes already had bad reputations by the late 70s. In the mid-late 70s labels on foods and cleaning products told you exactly what was in them. I remember because my father was an organic chemist by training, and he would look at most labels and explain what was in them, and why we weren't buying them. (My family ended up shopping for most of our groceries at organic food stores.) It turns out that a lot of people didn't want those ingredients either, and it was impacting sales, so companies successfully lobbied to get the disclosure requirements watered down. These days labels in the US basically tell you nothing. I studied organic chemistry in college, and there's little as disturbing to me as "natural flavors" or "natural colorings". You have no idea what the chemicals are, what they were extracted from, how they were extracted, and what compounds/processes were used in the extraction. It's a non-label that tells you nothing about what's actually in the food. We should be entitled by law to know what we're consuming, so that we can actually make informed decisions, and industrial food manufacturers don't want us to know, and have spent vast sums of money to ensure that we can't easily find out.

Aurornis 1y ago
> I studied organic chemistry in college, and there's little as disturbing to me as "natural flavors" or "natural colorings". You have no idea what the chemicals are, what they were extracted from, how they were extracted, and what compounds/processes were used in the extraction. It's a non-label that tells you nothing about what's actually in the food Ironically, this is what the legislation is moving toward: Anything "natural" is good, while anything "chemical" is bad to a lot of the world.
crazygringo 1y ago
> In the mid-late 70s labels on foods and cleaning products told you exactly what was in them. This is not true, and for some reason this seems to be a common urban myth. The distinction between natural and artificial flavors goes back to 1906, and in 1938 there was a stronger law requiring the disclosure of artificial flavoring, color, or preservatives. I don't know if you're referring to the 1958 Food Additives and Amendment Act, but that didn't really affect ingredient listings either -- it was about food safety, not disclosure. But there was nothing substantially different about ingredient listings between the 1970s and today. I honestly don't know where you got this information, or what kind of ingredients you were under the impression that your father was able to analyze. The 1960s and 1970s was definitely the era when awareness around these things began to grow among consumers, so it definitely helps explain your father's attention to these things. But the idea that disclosure requirements have been watered down, or that this is due to corporate lobbying, is something like an urban legend. There are certainly issues around trade regulation and naming, like which species of fish are or are not allowed to be labeled as catfish, similar to how champagne can only come from a particular region of France. So there is definitely massive lobbying around geographical disclosures and naming. But the idea that there has been some kind of massive shift of disclosure in terms of chemicals is just not true. If you look up the ingredients on actual historical processed snack labels from the 1970s, they're not any different from today.
freedomben 1y ago
"natural flavors" and "natural coloring" is also aggravating when you have food allergies. An example is paprika, which is sometimes listed and sometimes not. I hate that practice so much

Aurornis 1y ago

> I studied organic chemistry in college, and there's little as disturbing to me as "natural flavors" or "natural colorings". You have no idea what the chemicals are, what they were extracted from, how they were extracted, and what compounds/processes were used in the extraction. It's a non-label that tells you nothing about what's actually in the food Ironically, this is what the legislation is moving toward: Anything "natural" is good, while anything "chemical" is bad to a lot of the world.

crazygringo 1y ago

> In the mid-late 70s labels on foods and cleaning products told you exactly what was in them. This is not true, and for some reason this seems to be a common urban myth. The distinction between natural and artificial flavors goes back to 1906, and in 1938 there was a stronger law requiring the disclosure of artificial flavoring, color, or preservatives. I don't know if you're referring to the 1958 Food Additives and Amendment Act, but that didn't really affect ingredient listings either -- it was about food safety, not disclosure. But there was nothing substantially different about ingredient listings between the 1970s and today. I honestly don't know where you got this information, or what kind of ingredients you were under the impression that your father was able to analyze. The 1960s and 1970s was definitely the era when awareness around these things began to grow among consumers, so it definitely helps explain your father's attention to these things. But the idea that disclosure requirements have been watered down, or that this is due to corporate lobbying, is something like an urban legend. There are certainly issues around trade regulation and naming, like which species of fish are or are not allowed to be labeled as catfish, similar to how champagne can only come from a particular region of France. So there is definitely massive lobbying around geographical disclosures and naming. But the idea that there has been some kind of massive shift of disclosure in terms of chemicals is just not true. If you look up the ingredients on actual historical processed snack labels from the 1970s, they're not any different from today.

freedomben 1y ago

"natural flavors" and "natural coloring" is also aggravating when you have food allergies. An example is paprika, which is sometimes listed and sometimes not. I hate that practice so much