WASHINGTON, May 3 (UPI) -- The U.S. Department of Agriculture likes pyramids. Britain's Food Standards Agency prefers traffic lights. Tesco, Britain's leading supermarket chain, thinks signposts are the clearest.
They're all talking labels.
While U.S. consumers concerned about their weight and health must go online to analyze the best food-buying path for their physical profile, the British government's food authority has developed a new front-of-pack labeling scheme to help shoppers make healthier food purchases. A red traffic light warns the product is an unwholesome confection of fats and salts and sugars, a green light means the food is splendidly nutritious, and amber signifies it hovers somewhere unspecific in between.
At the consultation stage of the scheme's development, the Agency's Head of Nutrition Rosemary Hignett said: "We know people believe that a front-of-pack labeling scheme would make it easier to make healthy food choices. We need to ensure that we create a scheme that provides people with information in a format that will make it quick and easy for them to make informed choices."
Tesco's has drawn the ire of the department by disagreeing with them. It has rejected the traffic lights in favor of -- novel notion -- words. Signposts divided into five categories give what Tesco calls "key nutritional information" showing the amount of salt, fat, saturated fat, sugar and calories contained in a single serving of the product. This way, consumers can properly tailor their purchases to their individual dietary needs. The 300,000 members of the supermarket chain's Healthy Living club are being mailed information about the system, and over the coming months signpost labels will be phased in on the front of every product.
Informative labeling is the trend in Europe, too.
As of April 18, legislation went into force across the European Union requiring food-product labels to reveal any genetically modified ingredients. Called "Frankenstein food" in the United Kingdom, European consumers have responded so unfavorably to genetic modification (as genetic engineering is known) of their foods that Britain's leading food manufacturers and supermarkets have rejected GM food and GM ingredients. Food that accidentally contains 0.9 percent of GM will, however, still not require a label declaration under the new regulations. Nor will the yield of animal that have been fed on GM feed, like meat, milk, cream, butter and eggs. Friends of the Earth has launched a GM "Zero Tolerance" campaign, urging supermarkets to eliminate all GM ingredients however minute and push for the abolition of GM animal feed.
Under World Trade Organization rules, the United States has threatened to challenge the European Union's GM labeling. With a number of other countries it has already launched a case with the WTO against what amounts to a European freeze on the granting of GM licenses on GM food and crops.
While U.S. consumers are indifferent to the inclusion of GM ingredients in their foods, those who view GM with European caution need only check the PLU -- Produce Look Up -- code on their fresh produce to discover whether their fruit or vegetable has been genetically engineered. An "8" in front of the standard four-digit code signifies genetically engineered produce. Shopping is going to become slower and slower as we pause to read the labels.
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