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marmar

(76,982 posts)
Sat Feb 15, 2014, 10:10 AM Feb 2014

Jim Hightower: Shouldn't 'Natural' Foods Actually Be Natural?


from The Progressive:


Shouldn't 'Natural' Foods Actually Be Natural?
By Jim Hightower, Feb. 14, 2014


Years ago the delightfully-naughty movie star, Mae West, said: "I used to be Snow White, but I drifted."

Less delightful are some of the purity claims of such food manufacturing giants as PepsiCo, which has long marketed a line of its Frito-Lay snack foods as "Simply Natural." Natural? Anyone who's even looked at one of the company's strangely-puffed, caterpillaresque, cheese-powdered, "Cheetos" would have a hard time believing nature had anything to do with the concoctions. Sure enough, PepsiCo has quietly dropped the volatile "natural" claim from its snack packages, rebranding them with just the word "Simply."

The multibillion-dollar food maker says the shift is merely a routine adjustment of its marketing scheme – but it comes only after consumer groups have taken Pepsi, Campbell Soup, and other manufactures to court in the past couple of years, successfully challenging their use of the "natural" phrase as deceptive hype.

PepsiCo settled one of its cases last year by paying out $9 million to the challengers and agreeing to stop labeling its Naked Juice brand as "all natural." A marketing pitch for these drinks had bragged that they were "the freshest, purest stuff in the world." The naked truth, however, was that they were not only juiced up with artificial vitamins and synthetic fibers, but also included an additive made from formaldehyde – a cancer-causing compound. ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://progressive.org/shouldnt-natural-foods-actually-be-natural



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Jim Hightower: Shouldn't 'Natural' Foods Actually Be Natural? (Original Post) marmar Feb 2014 OP
What the fuck does "natural" even mean? longship Feb 2014 #1
natural is a bad word to use i agree dembotoz Feb 2014 #2
+1 n/t geomon666 Feb 2014 #3
+1 Silent3 Feb 2014 #5
Trouble is there is no national standard for "natural". no_hypocrisy Feb 2014 #4

longship

(40,416 posts)
1. What the fuck does "natural" even mean?
Sat Feb 15, 2014, 12:46 PM
Feb 2014

Arsenic is natural. So is lead. So is a lot of shit one does not want in their food.

IMHO Natural is a marketing term, not a description of anything about the food.

Silent3

(15,018 posts)
5. +1
Sat Feb 15, 2014, 02:17 PM
Feb 2014

The same thing can be said about the supposedly negative term "processed". Dicing is a process, baking is a process, so is squeezing.

Deity forbid that we have to actually consider individually the merits of each ingredient, each process, and the quantities of what we ingest, as if "natural = good, artificial = bad" isn't enough.

no_hypocrisy

(45,771 posts)
4. Trouble is there is no national standard for "natural".
Sat Feb 15, 2014, 01:04 PM
Feb 2014

There was a Supreme Court case in the Thirties (I think) that was about which products could be called "milk". There were products that were artificially constituted and called milk.


United States v. Carolene Products Co. ("filled milk&quot

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Carolene_Products_Co.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/304/144

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