Hannafords' ratings expose that most processed foods labelled as "healthy" are misleading at best. I'm surprised the grocers haven't been sued or blacklisted.
I don't think we collectively care, unfortunately.
[S]everal customers said they had heard about Guiding Stars in radio advertisements or seen it in the store, but that it had not influenced their purchasing. Several shoppers said they did not see the point.Wow, quality nutrition and quality parenting there.
"I buy whatever it is on my list," said Karen Wilson, 43. "If my kids want Cheerios, I buy them Cheerios and don't look at the stars."
LiseAnne Deoul, 34, said she liked the idea of Guiding Stars even though the system had not helped her narrow her choices during a quick stop last week to buy pasta.It does not occur to people that this tells you something useful about pasta?
"All of it was the same," she said. "They all had two stars."
This is why dishonest food labeling works, and why it'll continue to work regardless of what the stores may do.
1 comment:
I was gonna blog this in my blog, but you know what? You brought it up, first to press and all that, so it's going in a comment here instead.
I saw this quote from page 2 of the article, from that food industry tracker lady:
“They have to keep the taste,” she said. “Look at all those super-duper healthy products that are in those healthy food stores. They don’t taste good.”
She added, “Nothing is healthy if you get right down to it, except mother’s milk, and that’s probably got too much fat.”
First, I'm fairly certain that food tasted pretty good before we had the technology to process all the nutrition out of it. It only seems to taste bad now because we're hammered with the idea that healthy food tastes bad, even by those companies purporting to make healthy food: "You don't have to give up flavor to eat healthy! Try our new blargle, healthy but very tasty!" That sort of advertising assumes that healthy food generally tastes bad, and we collectively nod along with it.
Second, the "nothing is healthy" line is just precious. Reduction ad absurdum flavored with a healthy portion of Rove-style ridicule. This type of crap also gets the collective wink and nod.
This type of thinking is the problem. It perpetuates that tendency a lot of people have to just give up. "It's too hard to do it right, and I can't do it perfectly anyway, so I give up." How many times have you heard that?
Why can't people understand the difference between perfect, good enough, and not even trying? Of course we can't have perfect nutrition; we don't have perfect knowledge. We can sure have good enough nutrition, and we have all the knowledge we need to do that right now.
The food companies, with their New Healthier Food? Sorry, guys, they're not even trying, and they don't deserve credit other than for figuring out yet another way to suck the money out of our collective pocket.
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