Mark Bittman Proposes a New Food Label Concept

20 Oct, 2012

by Jenna Blumenfeld, NewHope 360

Click to see the full info graphic.

Food indus­try advo­cate and jour­nal­ist Mark Bittman wrote a com­pelling op-ed about food labels in last Sunday’s edi­tion of The New York Times. The arti­cle titled “My Dream Food Label,” out­lined what he thinks are the most impor­tant aspects a food label should contain.

Apart from label­ing GMOs, many believe that cur­rent food labels don’t meet con­sumer needs. Too much infor­ma­tion, com­bined with oft-confusing serv­ing sizes, per­cent daily val­ues, and loop­holes such as trans fat con­tent (a com­pany can label a prod­uct 0 grams trans fat even if it has 0.5 g trans fats per serving—eat more than a serv­ing and you’re con­sum­ing quite a bit).

Plus, the sim­ple back-of-package loca­tion of the cur­rent food label can be eas­ily over­looked by hur­ried shoppers.

The answer, Bittman argues, is to adopt the traf­fic light model (green means a great choice, yel­low means eat some­times, red means eat spar­ingly or never).

Multi-dimensional food scoring

Current traf­fic light mod­els mea­sure foods one-dimensionally. They are based solely on nutri­tional con­tent. In col­lab­o­ra­tion with the design firm Werner Design Werks, Bittman con­cep­tu­al­ized a front-of-package food label fac­tor­ing in nutri­tion, wel­fare (of the work­ers who made the prod­uct, sus­tain­abil­ity, car­bon foot­print, that sort of thing), and what he calls “foodness.”

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at NewHope360.com.

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