Food Labels that Matter | The Business Ethics Blog

Product labels are important, both practically and ethically. Reading the label is a key way to make sure the thing you?re buying meets your needs. Labels on products can help inform consumers about what they?re buying, reducing what economists call information asymmetries between buyer and seller. Where substantial information asymmetries exist, voluntary exchanges can fail to live up to the promise of mutual benefit, and society as a whole suffers from the resulting reduction in market efficiency.

Of course, not everything that could be said about a product could possibly be crammed onto a product?s label, so generally the information provided consists of what the maker of the product really wants to brag about, what consumers insist on knowing, and anything beyond that that regulators have seen fit to insist upon.

So precisely what gets labeled, and what form the labelling takes, matters a lot. Now while the moral significance of labels in general is not disputed, just what should be included on labels is hotly debated.

Take, for instance, the question of whether a food product has been genetically modified (GM). Or, more precisely, whether the ancestor of the organism from which a food product was derived was genetically modified by means of a particular set of laboratory procedures. It?s important to be precise, here, because there is virtually nothing that we eat today that hasn?t been ?genetically modified? by humans in some loose sense.

If you thought the question of GM labelling had gone away with the demise of California?s Proposition 37 this past November, think again. Washington State is apparently about to hold a vote on the issue, and there are reports that the anti-GM faction has been energized by the battle in California, and perhaps even galvanized by the massive sums of money that ?big food? and ?big ag? apparently spent to help defeat Prop 37. But as I?ve argued before, the demand for mandatory labelling of GM foods is misguided: the broad scientific consensus is that there?s no reason to worry about GM foods. Making such labelling mandatory, just because some people want to know if their food?s genes have been tweaked in certain ways, would be unjust.

Contrast this with the stunning report recently released by the ocean conservation group, Oceana. Nevermind subtle genetic modifications. Oceana found that a very high proportion of the fish sold in American retail outlets isn?t even from the species indicated on the label. So consumers are buying ?snapper? that isn?t really snapper, and ?tuna? that isn?t really tuna. Here, consumers are being lied to. Information isn?t just being omitted; the information being given is actually a lie, and so consumers are being cheated.

If the food companies of the world are going to expend money and effort to provide consumers with information, it?s pretty clear which kind of issue they should expend it on.

Like this:

Like Loading...

Source: http://businessethicsblog.com/2013/03/07/food-labels-that-matter/

Chris Kluwe Jennifer Granholm Tulane player injured fox sports obama speech Art Modell Frank Ocean Gay