The “Imitation” Food Label and the Food Industry (Pollan)

The 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act imposed strict rules requiring that the word “imitation” appear on any food product that was, well, an imitation ... [And] the food industry [argued over the word], strenuously for decades, and in 1973 it finally succeeded in getting the imitation rule tossed out, a little-notice but momentous step that helped speed America down the path of nutritionism.
… The American Heart Association, eager to get Americans off saturated fats and onto vegetable oils (including hydrogenated vegetable oils), was actively encouraging the food industry to “modify” various foods to get the saturated fats and cholesterol out of them, and in the early seventies the association urged that “any existing and regulatory barriers to the marketing of such foods be removed.”
And so they were when, in 1973, the FDA (not, note, the Congress that wrote the law) simply repealed the 1938 rule concerning imitation foods. It buried the change in a set of new, seemingly consumer-friendly rules about nutrient labeling so that news of the imitation rule’s appeal did not appear until the twenty-seventh paragraph of The New York Times’ account, published under the headline F.D.A. PROPOSES SWEEPING CHANGE IN FOOD LABELING: NEW RULES DESIGNED TO GIVE CONSUMERS A BETTER IDEA OF NUTRITIONAL VALUE. ... The revised imitation rule held that as long as an imitation product was not “nutritionally inferior” to the natural food it sought to impersonate—as long as it had the same quantities of recongized nutrients—the imitation could be marketed without using the dreaded “i” word.

— Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (pgs. 34-35, 2008)

Posted by Joshua Hynes

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8, 2008 at 1:03pm. It has been filed under News, Science, Books, Quotes, Joshua.

Comments

Finally! 7 loving people have cared enough to share their thoughts with me. Why don't you join the party?

Thanks for sharing the information on food. we should aware from all this laws.

imitation jewellery india wrote on Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 6:34am.
Your first real comment on the subject. I’m honored. This happened two years before I was born and it makes me angry because things like this continue to go on even today.

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july wrote on Saturday, February 13, 2010 at 2:05pm.
Does anyone know a good site for understanding ingredients on a food label? For example, if I wanted to know what the ingredients in bread are, the ingredients are all technical names, except for flour and salt. So how do I know what is what?

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