Well, here’s some news: The FDA has finally gotten around to telling a few mass food-distribution companies to quit with the fraudulent claims on the labels.
Mirabilis!
It’s surprising, really, that consumers buy into this hucksterism. They must, though; otherwise the megacorporations wouldn’t bother with foisting lies on the public. They’ve been doing it for a long time. And it must be said that even skeptics get drawn in.
When my son was a baby, I went out of my way to buy Beech-Nut juices in infant bottles for him, because Beechnut advertised loud and clear that all its juices were 100 percent unadulterated juice and nothing but juice: no sugar, no water, no adulterants.
About the time the dentist was excoriating me for feeding him sugar and I was protesting that I never once gave him anything with sugar in it, out came a report that Beechnut’s apple juice contained almost no juice at all: it was mostly water and sugar. His little teeth were ruined. He had to have something like 20 fillings.
Since then I’ve had no trust at all for any food manufactured by any large corporation. If they’ll lie about baby food, they’ll lie about anything. And as for juices, all you have to do is read the fine print on the label (if you can see it!) to find that a large proportion of bottled and frozen “juices” really consist mostly of white grape juice and corn syrup, with a whisper of some other fruit juice added to flavor it like the juice it claims to be.
The wild claims that things like pomegranate juice will do splendid things for your health raise my hackles, as do additives stuck in otherwise normal food to make us think the adulterated stuff has some medical benefit. Personally, I want my food to be food, not medicine. If I want extra vitamins, calcium, or antioxidants, I’ll swallow a pill, thank you!
Well, it’s past time the federal regulatory agencies woke up. No one else seems to be in a position to block the corporate pseudo-government that controls the nation’s food supply from lying about its products, adulterating them, or foisting substandard products on the public. Beech-Nut, we see, is among the several corporations specifically ordered to remove misleading labels.
Bring the bug spray, Uncle Sam! The cockroaches have taken over the larder!