The Egg Industry Can’t Label Its Product as Nutritious or Safe (But It Wanted To)

When you really start to dig deeper into the ways in which food producers and marketers can manipulate systems to label foods in ways that aren’t downright lying but come pretty close, the information you’ll find can become, quite simply, infuriating.

Take what’s reported in this video by Nutritionfacts.org about the egg industry, for example. You’ll find news the USDA itself warned egg producers that they may be violating labeling laws if they tout their foods as “nutritious” or “safe.” But the USDA advised that egg producers can call their foods “nutrient-dense.”

Why? Because there is no formal definition of this term by the regulating agencies. We can call soda and fast food cheeseburgers “nutrient-dense” if we want, so long as we don’t call them “safe” or “nutritious.” We can slap it on labels and let the marketing do its work on people because it’s “allowed.”

If this kind of thing bothers you at all, be sure to check out this informative video about this and other points of labeling contention and terminology manipulation and then pass it along to everyone you know who gives a damn about the way food companies try to use words and phrases to tell a story about foods (that often couldn’t be farther from the truth).

Image source: Rudiger Wolk / Wikimedia Commons