Big Brother meddling in your fridge and trolley

THERE’S no question that foods should be labelled so consumers know what they’re getting (and that information is already there).

ANY new opposition is keen to take its first scalp and it is clear that Labor smells blood in Assistant Minister Fiona Nash’s axing of a “star chart” website designed to rank foods by their relative healthiness.

After all, it is a matter of faith in some circles that “Big Food” and the Coalition spend their evenings roaming the suburbs in black vans, knocking unsuspecting kiddies off their pushbikes and forcing them to eat saturated fat at gunpoint, shaking them down for their lunch money for good measure.

Amazingly, however, neither the government nor much of the press is focusing on the most important question in the story. That is, would such a website — or any other star-rating system for food — do any good?

Or, as is so often the case, would such a scheme be just one more expensive intrusion by the state into ordinary citizens’ shopping trolleys, designed to show the government was “doing something” while encouraging society’s dependence on headline-hungry public health mandarins?

On one level, it is almost touching the faith those who support rating food have in the power of labels and government-run websites to change the world, or the lack of common sense already out there in the community.

But more deeply, such systems — even those claiming to do nothing more than provide more information on a label — are simplistic at best and insulting at worst.

There’s no question that foods should be labelled so consumers know what they’re getting (and that information is already there).

But nutrition is complex and hardly “settled science”, as anyone who has visited a bookshop and seen titles urging readers to either quit or keep eating sugar side by side can attest. And this is the heart of the matter: just because you offer consumers more information does not necessarily mean you are offering good, or genuinely useful, information.

Reducing the relative healthiness of any particular product to one simple index is near-impossible. An index of nutrition is nothing like a rating to indicate how much power or petrol a new washing machine or automobile might consume. Nor do stars help the millions of Australians who need to avoid particular ingredients such as sugar, salt or allergens.

Under close examination it becomes clear that the axed system had more holes than a block of Swiss cheese. Under the system, it is reported that high-calorie, sugar-laden fruit juices would have received a five-star rating, the best there is.

Would consumers be forgiven for thinking washing down a bowl of poorly rating, highly processed, sugary breakfast cereal with a big glass of the stuff might still average out to a healthy meal?

Nor can members of the public health industry, who rely on promoting the urgent need for these sorts of systems for their livelihoods and thus keep healthy food on their more enlightened tables, point to much evidence that such a labelling system would work — aside from quoting one another, that is.

In practice, attempts to coerce, guide or otherwise limit the choice of consumers tends to backfire spectacularly. Denmark famously scrapped its fat tax — something still mooted by Australian academics as a solution to our own dietary woes — when it was found to do nothing but cost jobs in private businesses hit by the levy, while growing the bureaucracy required to administer it.

Nutrition is a complex subject whose orthodoxies change with the season and whose experts cannot give a straight answer to the question “why do some people get fat?” (though many suggest it is sedentary lifestyles and not scalloped potatoes that are the problem).

The notion that nutrition can be boiled down to a simple star rating is naive and reductionist.

Were star ratings implemented, they would threaten to create a sort of learned helplessness around food choices.

But never mind. To the advocates of websites and labels and other systems to save us from ourselves, most Australians waddle through life as victims of a giant con job, too gulled by the siren song of advertising to steer their trolleys through the fresh produce aisle.

The only thing that can save us from turning into the real-life cast of Wall-E is the good offices of technocrats and academics whose definition of “evidence” is to cite each other ad nauseum, yet nevertheless feel entitled to mould our choices to their will.

At the heart of the question is one of freedom, and once again the same sort of people who rightly rebel against the idea the government might decide what could go on in their bedrooms have no problem slipping into your kitchen to have a poke around in the fridge.

James Morrow writes about food and culture at prickwithafork.com