A lot of thought goes into how food is marketed to people, using the packaging to try to entice them to think that it may be tastier or healthier or more environmentally friendly or otherwise better than it really is. Most of us tend to be at least somewhat skeptical about these claims and not take them at face value and as long as the products are not downright harmful, are willing to overlook the exaggerations snd even outright lies that are told us.
Not Spencer Sheehan, a lawyer in New York state, who has taken upon himself to carefully examine the products that are sold in stores and, if he finds that they have been shading the truth, to sue them. The New Yorker magazine of September 11 has a long piece about his efforts.
Sheehan, forty-four, specializes in consumer-protection class-action suits. Specifically, he focusses on packaged foods, and on the authenticity of their ingredients and flavors. Sheehan has sued the makers of frosted strawberry Pop-Tarts (dearth of real strawberries), Hint of Lime Tostitos (absence of lime), Snapple “all natural” fruit drinks (absence of natural juice), Keebler’s fudge-mint cookies (lack of real fudge and mint), Cheesecake Factory brown bread (insufficient whole-grain flour), Trident original-flavor gum (lack of real mint, despite package’s illustration of a blue mint leaf), and many more, generally seeking millions in damages from each. He also pursues class actions unrelated to food, involving subtle fraud in products such as toothpaste (Tom’s of Maine Fluoride-Free Antiplaque & Whitening, for containing no ingredient that fights plaque) and sunscreen (Coppertone Pure & Simple, for being neither). Sheehan emphasized this breadth of scope during our first phone conversation. “It took Matthew McConaughey years after that movie he did with Sarah Jessica Parker—‘Failure to Launch’?—to be taken seriously as an actor,” he told me. “No one likes to be typecast.”
But Sheehan has been typecast, with his tacit approval. He’s a food-label zealot, and is especially relentless with vanilla cases. (Tabloids have called him “the vanilla vigilante.”) “Real” fruit and artificial smoke flavoring are in his crosshairs, too. Since 2018, Sheehan’s firm has filed more than five hundred consumer-protection class-action suits, making New York one of the top states for such cases. At annual food-law conferences, presenters displaying litigation trends provide two sets of statistics: one including Sheehan’s cases, one without. Some of his lawsuits, including one involving an “aged vanilla” claim made by A&W Root Beer, have resulted in multimillion-dollar settlements; some make headlines; many are dismissed. Defendants and judges “might roll their eyes at a case,” Sheehan said, “because, yes, it can be somewhat amusing. But I can proudly and honestly say I’ve never been sanctioned by a court for filing anything frivolous.”
To the outside observer, some of the quiet comedy of Sheehan’s work comes from the fact that we don’t necessarily consider snack-food flavoring to be “real,” and from the startling idea that anyone would. For Sheehan, though, the farce is the deception itself. “ ‘Smokehouse’ almonds,” he muttered. “These almonds have never seen a smokehouse in their— and Blue Diamond never owned a smokehouse, either.” He has sued the company eleven times.
…Salesmanship becomes particularly complex in the vast middle of the supermarket, where “edible food-like substances,” as the writer Michael Pollan has described them, are sold, between fresh produce on one end and chilled dairy on the other. Makers of processed foods, which are the main target of Sheehan’s investigations, expend considerable effort trying to convince consumers that their products are healthy, “natural,” and desirable, and we expend some effort believing them, often so that we can enjoy the products’ deliciousness. “The field is all about connotation, whether verbal or visual,” Jacob Gersen, the director of Harvard Law School’s Food Law Lab, told me. “Traditionally, private market gets the front of the package, and government gets the back.” Front labels give us images of farms and fields, and talk of antioxidants, fibre, omega-3s, vitamins, and probiotics; on back labels, we find “natural and artificial flavors,” high-fructose corn syrup, carrageenan, soy lecithin, and xanthan and guar gums.
While I personally would not be too bothered by exaggerated claims as long as the product was not unsafe, I am glad that there are people like Sheehan who try to keep the companies at least somewhat honest.
I have used the details of vanilla chemistry and the analytical methods needed to detect the differences between vanilla extracted from vanilla orchid and lab synthesized vanilla when teaching organic and biochemistry. The price differentials between the two products are enormous which has led to some synthetic producers making materials that can pass some of the analytical tests. This has resulted in having to use more sophisticated testing, such as the distribution of Carbon-12 and Carbon-13 in the vanillin, to detect the difference.
The Wikipedia entry on Vanillin gives a good account of the history of the synthetic version. There is also now vanillin that is produced by microbial action on rice bran that can be labeled as “natural”.
A nice short read on the topic and some related chemical stories is
http://www.roaldhoffmann.com/sites/all/files/fraudulent_molecules.pdf
I love when I see products like swedish fish blazoned with “fat free!” (because it’s pure sugar) or “gluten free!” rice, etc. Marketing people are despicable slime, who exist solely to sell products as being better than they know them to be.
I’m glad somebody is suing food corporations for the garbage they produce and sell as ‘food’. Soybean oil and byproducts are not nutritious food for humans, and it’s now in about 90% of all the food products sold in grocery stores. Im particularly annoyed that it’s allowed in chocolate, but it’s now also in basic products like bottled salad dressing, ketchup, soup, mayonnaise, bread, etc…
I can bake bread, and make salad dressing, but it would be lovely to be able to buy food without having to examine every label (with tiny, tiny print) to see if they have added the cheapest soy oil to increase their profits.
Federal farm subsidies for corn and soy drive the USA FrankenFoods industry.
Corporate farming shouldn’t be allowed to dictate food choices and labeling. Nutrition should be the standard, not corporate profits.
This is one of the stupidest trends. Sprue is a rare genetic condition, you either had it at birth or you didn’t. It’s not the gluten giving you a bellyache, it’s the amylase in the wheat at 4x the natural level, and constant micro doses of the bacterium gut poison that has been engineered into the wheat and corn and soybean oil.
My personal bugbear is the “GMO Free!” labels on foods that contain no ingredients for which there exists a legally marketable genetically modified version.
Words mean things, dammit!
@Marcus Ranum: agree 100% about the stupidity of the claims, but they’re also taking advantage of the stupid consumers. Starting in the 1970s and running through the 2010s, fat was considered a terrible, terrible thing--the absolute worst thing human beings could put in their bodies. Therefore many sugary and nutritionally-null foods had the “fat-free!” claim on them and the American population became heavier and heavier because of the carbs. And just as “fat free!” was a selling point then, “Vegetarian!” or “Vegan!” or “Plant Based!” are selling points for the stupid. One example: “plant-based peanut butter!” (in contrast with sausage-based peanut butter?)
@Tethys; agreed, and also the use of dough conditioners to make it rise faster. People who can tolerate gluten products just fine in places where they don’t accelerate the rise, are sickened when they have the adulterated bread. This leads people to think the problem is gluten when it’s not, but the solution is the same--avoid eating gluten-containing products unless the affected person knows the source.
@Tethys,
Another sneaky spot soybean oil is added in commercial products is in jarred pesto sauces.
I wish there were half as much attention to allergens, and yes, gluten. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to label other grains gluten-free, because it’s important to avoid contamination. And that it were easier to find alternatives for toothpaste, meds, etc.
Celiac disease is more common in older people, which only makes sense if people can acquire it later in life:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8767653/
“In western countries, the prevalence is around 0.6% histologically confirmed and 1% in serological screening of the general population. The female-to-male ratio ranges from 1:3 to 1.5:1. CD is known to affect all age groups, including the elderly; more than 70% of new patients are diagnosed above the age of 20 years.10 Some of these adults probably have had undetected disease since childhood; in other cases they have contracted the disease in adulthood.11”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6545713/
I once burst out laughing in the grocery store aisle when I saw a package of salt labeled “gluten free”.
Tethys, soybean oil is a fine oil on its own, though canola is even better. Add it to salads, use in sautéing, you’d be better off than with many other oils. Use of high amounts of oils or fats (of any kind) together with high amounts of sugar is problematic, and that’s the main problem with their use in foods sold in heavily-processed form.
As for gluten-sensitivity -- turns out many people discover late in life that their health improves when they omit gluten. That has been the case for my spouse. In this specific case I mean improved digestion, better iron absorption, all-but-disappearance of psoriatic arthritis, significant improvement in psoriasis and many other improvements. And it wasn’t due to change from a junky diet to a good one, but from replacing whole-grain bread with gluten-free fake-bread (spouse refuses to call it bread), wheat tortillas with corn tortillas, wheat-based pasta with gluten-free pasta, avoiding beer altogether (never really enjoyed it). The rest of the diet remained the same: lots of vegetables, pulses, eggs, cheese. Over the last 2.5 years there were 2 instances of spouse accidentally consuming gluten, which resulted in being very ill. Neither corn nor soybean oil cause any problems.
I limit the issues with food labeling by preparing the bulk of my food at home from single ingredients. (Then I can worry about the pros and cons of ‘organic’ vs conventionally grown, plants grown in different places, etc -- or not.)
I read a fascinating book by Steve Ettlinger called “Twinkie, Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated Into What America Eats”, that goes down the ingredient list of a typical processed food and explains what each one is, how it is derived and it’s function.
If you’ve ever wondered what things like polysorbate 80, mono- and diglycerides or calcium sulfate are, or how flour is bleached (with chlorine gas!) this book will answer your questions.
Re: soybean oil, on of the deepest dives I know regarding claims about the various ‘seed oils’ is A Comprehensive Rebuttal to Seed Oil Sophistry.
Also see Are Seed Oils Inflammatory?!
@2 Marcus,
I’ve seen (mostly in the 90’s in the US, back when I lived there… no clue if they still do that…) products labelled as “80% fat free” which sounds like a lot until you realise you’re basically eating 20% fat.
Is there any advantage for real vanilla vs vanillin?
Tethys @4: That a condition is genetic does not necessarily mean it has to be expressed since birth. Depending on the situation, it may take time for the symptoms to fully develop. There are many inborn errors of metabolism and movement disorders that have both early and late onset forms, and in both cases it is the very same mutation.
Trickster Goddess @12: Also recommended: The Secret Family by David Bodanis. (One thing I learned there: Chocolate-flavored items are made with more inferior ingredients than others because the chocolate flavor is strong enough to cover other stuff. And chocolate ice cream is apparently the worst.)
Tethys @4, Marja Erwin@8
You certainly can gain a gluten intolerance in later life, it happened to one of my brothers in his late fifties, and to a cousin of Mr J’s in her sixties. And it isn’t sensitivity, it is actual intolerance medicallly diagnosed in both cases.
Also Tethys @3 one of the joys of a smart phone is being able to photograph a label in tiny print and enlarge it there and then; of course that doesn’t help so much when the text is also in a colour with little contrast to the backgound.
In the EU (and still in the UK so far) food labelling legally has to either list allergens separately or bold them in the ingredients list, and also say if the product is made in a facility that also produces soething using any of the allergens. This is helpful for people who are allergic to the tiniest amount of their allergen/s. I’ve a neice who is wary of eating cake outside the home as too many are made in kitchens that also mae cakes containing nuts, and that airbourne contamination is enough to set off her partner’s allergies when my neice kisses her later the same day.
Sorry about all the anecdotes, but in all three cases they have properr medical diagnoses.
@Anat. As to advantages, not really any differences. There are slight flavor differences because the natural product contains other flavor components beyond the main vanillin component. It is mostly an honesty of labeling issue, as the mislabeled product is being sold as a much more expensive component. It also impacts where you are sending the money, as you could be thinking you are supporting a group growing vanilla orchids, as opposed a group synthesizing the flavor component synthesized from petrochemical products. For a period of time a large amount was a by-product of processing wood pulp into paper, so it was coming from Sweden or the US pacific northwest.
#15 anat
I can taste the difference and prefer the real stuff.
* * * *
#2 Marcus #4 Tethys
We live in a free society and people believe and eat all sorts of things. Because, they can. There are people who don’t eat broccoli even though it’s nutritious and delicious. Nobody’s forcing them to eat it and they’d be happy if labels said “broccoli free”. Are marketing weasels extremely evil? Yes they are. But the reason anyone gives for what they eat doesn’t have to be a good one.
True labelling can be funny; not that long ago I got a packet of peanuts which had the small print “may contain traces of nuts”.
@1 nifty -- thanks for the link, much appreciated.
As for avoiding crap in food, I do what I can, cooking at home and such, but I resigned myself to being helpess in this regard. Too many opportunities for bastards to pull a fast one, and I am not a 24/7 analytical lab.
Here’s one who put it way better than me, (and I think this link I got somewhere somewhen here in FTblogs):
Soybean anything makes me horribly ill as if I have severe food poisoning, though it never bothered me until they engineered it to contain chemicals that kill any Lepidoptera larvae when consumed. I do in fact sometimes take a photo of the labels in order to magnify them, but it gets really annoying to go to all that trouble just to read the label, with the result that I’m unable to buy 90% of the food in any grocery store because it ALL contains soy, and a bunch of ingredients that aren’t food.
Nutrition is key to health.
OK Tethys, I see your situation. But going from ‘I am severely intolerant of soy products made of soy that was genetically modified in this manner’ to ‘soybean oil and byproducts are not nutritious food for humans’ is quite the leap. Even you could probably eat organic soy (for some silly reason organic labeling can’t be given to GMO products, even if they are grown using organic methods), and many people handle GMO soy just fine. I eat soy products daily.
I agree that nutrition is one key to health (though physical activity is appearing to be more impactful, or at least easier to optimize).
[can’t resist]
A bit like clickbait post titles, then.
(Pointing out exaggerations or outright lies is, to some, “absurd”)
@14 Robert79
I’ve seen …. products labelled as “80% fat free” which sounds like a lot until you realise you’re basically eating 20% fat.
It’s actually worse than that. In the US, “% fat content” depends on what you’re eating. If it’s meat, the percentage is by weight, not by calorie. If you buy a pound of so-called “80% lean” ground meat, what you’re getting is 20% fat by weight, or 0.2 pounds. The other 0.8 pounds is everything else, including water. What you’re getting is over 70% fat calories.
By this standard you could mix 1 pound of lard with 4 pounds of water and call the result “80% lean”.
@2 Marcus
Marketing people are despicable slime, who exist solely to sell products as being better than they know them to be.
They would call it “putting your best face forward” or something similar. They are, in essence, paid liars. If you want to be kind, you could call them con artists. Their art is to trick you into thinking that A is B. It is the one art that the US excels in above all others. Now, what do you call marketing people who work in politics? Lobbyists. That should explain a lot once you realize that the politicians are either their willing (paid) accomplices or their marks.
anat
I do in fact consider soybeans to be high quality animal feed, though I like tofu and mock duck.
. No, organic soybeans are also quite toxic to my digestion. The reason that GMOs aren’t allowed in organic foods is because they literally contain a completely organic gut poison. It’s supposedly harmless to humans but I suspect that many peoples ‘gluten allergies’ is actually a reaction to the various species of bacillus toxin they contain.
Better in Australia, jimf.
cf. https://www.foodstandards.gov.au/industry/labelling/Pages/default.aspx
Where the tricksy part comes in is the blurb and the imagery, not the mandatory labelling.
Tethys, humans are animals.
Gotta do this.
Q-anon level type of stuff there.
No, the reason they aren’t allowed in what’s now called ‘organic’ foods (used to mean carbon-containing compounds, as in organic chemistry) is purely that they are not naturally occurring — that’s it. None of this poison thingy, except in conspiracists’ minds.
(Of course, it’s a fuzzy boundary. The inbred varieties of plants we now crop took thousands of years of modification — what they mean is direct rather than indirect genetic manipulation)
—
https://www.google.com/search?q=gary+larson+unnatural+food&tbm=isch
Oldies but goodies:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yj8bgNaW2lk
and
Tethys @28:
Ahem. Organic farming uses toxins. One example is copper sulfate. It is allowed because it is a naturally occurring mineral that can be mined, and has been in use in agriculture since at least as far as late antiquity. But it is a known toxin, and in fact back in the day we used it in the lab to kill cultures of mammalian cells that got contaminated with bacteria (in order to prevent spread of the contamination to nearby cultures that were growing in different wells of the same plate).
For more information see here and here
My personal complaint is regarding GMO/non-GMO. It is a meaningless label unless you know what the specific modification is that was made in a crop (or that could have been made in such a crop but was not in the specific item in question). Being genetically modified per se is neither good nor bad. That’s why I voted against labeling of GMO foods back when it was on the ballot in Washington, some 10 years ago or so. Such labeling would give people a false sense that they know what is in their food.
anat, well, not literally. Right?
(Whatever you wrote, I now know you did not mean it literally)
I’m pretty sure somewhere there is a figure of speech that indeed shouldn’t be taken literally. Heck, I doubt GMO is a meaningful category if taken literally.
And just to complicate things, it is rather common in the US to use the word ‘literally’ in a figurative manner, as a word of emphasis.
anat, heh.
Um, I should not take that literally, right? Apparently, that’s my problem.
So you don’t literally mean that you are somewhat sure about something.
Not bad — since I can’t tell what you supposedly mean with your figurative language, I can’t dispute you. This is all I can do.
Obviously, it would be overly simplistic and hyper-literal (snicker) to imagine you actually literally mean you doubt that. I’m getting the knack of it, you see.
You’re just hedging your bets.
Even I, however, understand that GMO ostensibly means genetically modified using what’s termed ‘genetic engineering’, rather than bred or modified using mutagens and selection.
So, yes, quite meaningful if taken literally, contrary to your (presumably) non-literal claim.
anat, final try before I give up.
#8 Marja
Some genetic conditions only become apparent gradually, skewing their symptoms and detection towards older ages.
#30 John
Animal is polysemic and can be used to refer to all animalia, or all bar humans.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/animal #2
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/animal #2 especially 2a
Context suggests this is the use intended by Tethys.
#31 John
Actually, the usage of organic to mean ‘of living things’ is the earlier meaning, and ‘organic chemistry’ used to mean the chemistry of such. It broadened to mean the chemistry of carbon and its compounds more or less in line with the disproof of the ‘vital force’ theory, somewhere in the 19th century.
#34 anat
My god, don’t get me started on the anti-GM hysteria. Genetics lectures at uni went through some specific examples, and genetic modification is some of the most careful science I have ever seen. The people that oppose genetic modification in food crops just don’t know what they’re talking about.
The guy’s a grifter bringing spurious lawsuits for personal gain.
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”.
Well well, an argument from ? ago, quotes and all, being dredged up for round 2. Definitely not troll behaviour.
Sometimes a sentence is meant to be taken literally, sometimes it is meant to be taken figuratively. Most adults manage to find the balance point, even if they can’t define it crisply. As it happens my son was at some point diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum, so we worked very specifically on this skill -- identifying sentences that don’t make much sense if taken literally, what they could possibly mean figuratively, does this potential figurative reading exist in the relevant cultural context etc. For a while ‘it’s just an expression that I use’ was his go-to excuse for rudeness, but he learned better. Somehow lots of people manage to flexibly switch between literal and figurative language while being understood, at least by members of their own subculture, and most of the time it’s just nota big deal. Even to non-native speakers.
Surely you’re aware that there’s a genetic component to autism.
Be aware that is not a condition which affects me; on the contrary, I am quite facile at manipulating and navigating metaphor and allegory and allusion and suggestion and indirectness and insinuation and ellipsis and hyperbole and litotes and ambivalence and double entendre and… well, and so forth.
I am not linguistically challenged, colloquially or otherwise, conceptually or literally, lexically or grammatically.
(Trust me on this, I get people here much more than people here get me)
My impression is that you enjoy not being ‘gotten’.
anat,
Even given that I am trying to explain myself to you? Interesting.
Anyway. Since apparently I have derailed, let’s see if we can ignore me and my merits for some time, and move on to make an actual proposition. A comment!
Topic supposedly is about truth in food labeling, and a person’s approach to that.
As quoted in the OP, “Sheehan, forty-four, specializes in consumer-protection class-action suits. Specifically, he focusses [sic] on packaged foods, and on the authenticity of their ingredients and flavors.”
So. If there’s no merit to his suit, nothing much happens other than that he is embarrassed and loses resources. Consumers lose nothing.
On the other hand, if there is merit to it, not only does he gain whatever he gains, but consumers in general also gain.
So, overall, a good thing.
Definitely not lose, maybe gain for the general consumer.
@John Morales, 44:
People here “get” you just fine. Indeed, i think of all the people who post here, you are the one on whom there would be most agreement about what you’re like.
Well, duh. I’m like the dude about whom most threads coalesce, and who supersedes the original topic of threads. Comment after comment all about me.
Happening right now.
(Why do you imagine I often tend to wait before posting on a given thread?
Heck, did you even realise I do that?)
/massive eyeroll
On a board where many commenters post in response to silly comments, this is all but an admission that you post the most shit.
Holms, eye-roller extraordinaire:
It’s not a board, it’s a blog.
And it’s an acknowledgement that I am the person about whom most shit is posted. Tall poppy syndrome, maybe.
(Facts are hard to dispute, no?)
You have accepted that you post the most shit. Thanks, see you next thread.
Holms,about me:
Heh. We both know you don’t believe that.
Why you essay such a stupid, jejune gambit is left to the imagination, but I suspect it’s because it’s all you have.
What I have accepted is that I am the person about whom most shit is posted.
Which is to say, there are more people posting more shit about me than about anyone else. And there are multiple people such as you (e.g. ShartBlob) who instantiate that circumstance, yet only one of me. Math.
I don’t like it any more than anyone else, but I am indeed the one about whom threads devolve, something that could not occur without those comments to and about me.
There’s one obvious way to stop my retorts from occurring, but somehow it’s never essayed by my little cohort of hangers-on. So it goes.
It is nice to have one’s comments properly appreciated, and your gratitude is quite satisfying though it is merely meet.
Thanks for the encouragement!
“Heh. We both know you don’t believe that.”
“When you have to pretend I mean other than what I wrote, you’ve jumped the shark.”
Nice, guilty of your own criticism within hours., Anyway, later.
Holms, heh.
We both know you didn’t mean what you wrote, and we both know you wrote what you wrote. Every reader knows what you wrote and what I wrote.
About what I wrote, you lied. Absurdly.
Me: “And it’s an acknowledgement that I am the person about whom most shit is posted. Tall poppy syndrome, maybe.”
You: “You have accepted that you post the most shit.”
About what you wrote, I was too truthful for your comfort.
—
Again: I don’t like it any more than anyone else, but I am indeed the one about whom threads devolve, something that could not occur without those comments to and about me.
Every one of your recent comments is about me.
And they’re about as truthful as the worst of food (mis)labeling.
Heh. “Thanks, see you next thread.”, quoth you earlier.
You’re just like those rellies who fucking chat forever in the vestibule before finally departing their visit — performative and persistent yet premature goodbyes without a hint of honesty.