A bit of a (in)practical idea today, labels on food. Depending on where you live the requirements of what a food manufacture has to put on its product varies. Here in the states basic ingredients and nutritional information based on suggested serving size is required, which may prove marginal useful if you did not know the insane sodium content crisps, but beyond that running the numbers on everything you buy is a time consuming task and if our obesity epidemic is any indication most people simply ignore this information.
I suggest we start a simple color coded label program, the bottom 20% of all packaging of all food stuffs should follow a color code, I suggest bright green being reserved for items a person should eat a lot of (in season fruits and veggies) going to darker reds and browns for “sometimes foods” processed grains and meats to dark purple and blacks for crap: processed sugar, soda, canned cheese ect… humans can make comparisons between different colors rather easily, so the brighter a label the better the food. Now as to what exactly gets a bright green vs. a slightly darker green, I can think of no better task for out nations top nutritionists, our modern food delivery network works off a stupid centralized model, we grow food on huge farms, and then disperse the food around the country and the world, at TREMENDOUS energy cost. This also means to eliminate costly (for the company any way) waste we get “food products” that are shelf stable for vast amounts of time. This is (sometimes) achieved with the use of “processing” which can range from the addition of ascorbic acid (vitamin c) all the way to blasting with nitrates and ammonium ( looking at you pink slime). This is not healthy or sustainable, and adding a simple color code to labels should make it clear to the consumer what is “good” to eat and what is crap.
Now I understand all to well the barriers to this type of regulation, first the food co. would rally against it, then they would aim to pervert the science to give their products a market advantage, but if the focus remains solely set on helping people change their eating habits it might prove a useful tool, imagine being able to walk into any grocery store in the country and see in an instant what food is healthy and sustainable at a glance, to hold up any two pastas and compare which one has better nutritional composition in an instant. I think having our corporations spend their efforts and energy trying to figure out how to provide good and sustainable food is a far preferable situation, compared with what we have now: our corporations spending their efforts on how to trick us into eating crap that is cheap and not good for us.
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