Cue worse-tasting chocolate bars showing up in the stores, proudly proclaiming on their wrappers: NOW WITH MORE HAZELNUTS.
Note that a lot can be told just looking at the label, but few people do it. For example quality meats tend to have more protein, quality diary products tend to to have more fat. High salt and sugar is usually a bad sign.
The order of ingredients is important too: greatest amount first. It means that if the thing they advertise in front of the package is way down the list, that's not good.
The front of the package prominently declared "Made With Real Cheese!".
When she read the ingredients list, not only was cheese way down on the list--it was on the bread ingredients list, not the "cheese" dip ingredients list.
Certain strong flavors, like mint, pepper, and lemon, usually appear pretty low in the ingredients list at the same time they're headlining the label.
I got in the habit trying to avoid palm oil, but there's all kinds of surprises in there.
Not in the "I'm shocked there are chemicals in my food" way. But just in the transparent differences in formulation by weight.
Check out marinades / BBQ sauces and baked beans.
Its terrible how disconnected we are from the things that sustain us. There are so many companies involved in producing something simple. We can gradually expose the consumers to all these business processes we've accumulated over many thousands of years. I think it could be mind blowing in many ways.
People aslo behave different if someone might be looking. Investors get a tour of the facility and everything seems designed for them rather than for the customer. I've seen places remove chairs and force everyone to stand all day simply because it looked good to investors. Open floor plans anyone? From an investor perspective the less room for livestock the better. Salaries cant possibly be low enough. etc
Have them make [say] a nice video showing the production process. Have some fancy committee sign of on it. Or if the product is to embarrassed to show how it's made have it pay the 1% extra taxes.
However the UK did not vote to join in a plebiscite. We joined in 73, and had a referendum on leaving in 75.
I'd suggest that the issue in the UK was in part that the changed nature of our constitution after joining was never explained in schools (no Civics classes). Plus almost all discussion of it domestically tended to use the phrase "Common Market".
So we ended up creating a generation who were naturally eurosceptic, and were quite surprised by the changes post '94 once the EU emerged, and the single market reforms came in to existence.
Basically a lot of the people in that generation were not aware that we had joined a political union, with a level of law and government above that of the nation state. The generation before (who voted in '75) should have known that. The various institutions of state (government, civil service, courts, judges, etc) knew.
However that general ignorance existed (and still exists), it being reflected in our MPs, where a lot of them still (after 3 years of confusion) still do not understand the nature of their (and our) relationship with the EU.
Some people claim it was sold as purely economic union, some claim it was well known goal back then.
But a lot of the rules that are supposedly so bad are rules that would be there in a purely economic union.
Ridiculous proposition.
Formulations change pretty much constantly for various reasons (ingredients become more expensive, or you change suppliers, or you decide to adjust something to make the product better or cheaper or both), and adding bureaucratic friction as well as packaging redesign is completely impractical. Packaging can take several weeks if not month to produce and you would have to constantly throw them away with this kind of rule. Wasteful.
1. I want to be able to compare w other brands 2. I don’t want any filler at all!
If chocolate goes up in price, I’ll pay more to get the real stuff, or buy less of it. I most certainly won’t buy a bar of food wax with chocolate solids, or whatever Hershey is
Depends where you live but many brands actually indicate their content of chocolate directly on the box (70%, 80% etc... unless you buy milk chocolate.
As for not wanting any filler at all: then buy pure cocoa beans! If you buy processed food you should always assume there is some kind of "filler". And not that "fillers" are also necessary sometimes to give a proper texture to what you eat and make sure the taste is consistent from one box to another.
All dane-pgp's proposed law would change is that when they change the labels to match the new formulation, which they must do, they would have to include a change date or a version number of something like that on the new label.
Now if we could only get a "roasted-on" date requirement for coffee ...
The proposal was a lot more aggressive than that -- dane-pgp specified that the packaging must mention if the ingredients stay the same but their relative proportions change. Under current law, there is no reason to alter the labeling for such a change[1], so you'd be seeing a huge requirement for new labels that weren't formerly required.
[1] Actually, there are two. First, you might switch up the relative proportions so much that the rank order of the absolute amounts changes, which would require reprinting the ingredients list. This is really unlikely.
Second, you might end up altering the Nutrition Facts information. That would also require relabeling. I don't know how likely that is; the Nutrition Facts panel is a pretty low-resolution instrument.
Large manufacturers will be fine, there's no particular reason for society to care about their wellbeing so much.
Of course companies would protest, claiming that their recipes are trade secrets, but we already require that products list their ingredients, and we protect trademarks for products, which seems unreasonable if companies can alter the contents of what is being protected, without telling customers.
To be clear, though, I'm not actually advocating that the labels report precise amounts of each ingredient, but they should be forced to say something like "40% more salt" or "70% more water", at least next to the ingredients, and "New recipe" on the front (as many products already do).