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At a recent lunch debate in Brussels, the question of the day for assembled pundits was this: How many servings does a bag of biscuits contain?
That question lies at the heart of one of the fiercest debates in Brussels these days – over the creation of a new Europe-wide system of nutrition labels for food. A proposal to reshape the system for the first time in more than a decade faces a key vote in the European parliament on Tuesday.
The debate may not carry the weight of the Greek debt crisis, which could re-shape the European Union. Nor does it have the urgency of the Copenhagen climate talks.
But nutrition labels would represent one of the most visible and enduring consumer measures by a bureaucracy generally dismissed by its subjects as remote and unintelligible. The fight is also a reminder of Brussels’ complicated love of labels. In the last year, the EU has considered new labels for energy efficiency, tyres, and organic produce. New labels to denote heritage sites are in the works.
To politicians, labelling schemes offer a simple response to the regulatory challenges of an increasingly confusing and uncertain world. Yet they tend to carry unintended consequences that make their implementation agonising.
The recent overhaul of energy efficiency labels is a case in point. It was held up for months amid fights over such questions as what shade of green to use on a colour spectrum, and whether to keep the existing “A to G” efficiency scale or broaden it with new “A+”, “A++”, and “A+++” designations. Companies such as Siemens demanded the pluses so that the next generation of appliances would not relegate today’s refrigerators and toasters to “B” or even “C” status. They hired lobbyists and public relations firms to make their case.
Yet the passions unleashed by energy efficiency pale in comparison to the battle over nutrition labels, which were drafted with the salutary goal of giving Europe’s increasingly obese and diabetes-afflicted consumers a quick and easy way to understand what they are eating.
They have since descended into a wrestling match between industry, politicians and consumer groups about the proper font size and location on a package, what information labels should include, and how far they should go in terms of interpreting nutritional information.
“It’s become a free-for-all,” said one operative from the CIAA, a food industry trade group that includes such members as Coca-Cola and Nestlé. BEUC, a European consumer organisation, has called for colour-coded icons – red, amber and green – on the front of each package to inform consumers how much fat, saturated fat, sugar and salt it contains per 100g.
Predictably, most food companies, who would rather greet shoppers with an appealing logo than a health warning, want to relegate all but the number of calories per serving to the fine print on the back of the package. The mere mention of so-called traffic lights gives them indigestion.
“Are you going to put a red light on panettone in the Christmas season?” expostulated one Italian food executive, touching on the inherent sensitivity of developing a system for a 27-nation bloc with diverse eating cultures.
Yet the essential question in the debate is what constitutes a serving? While it may be easy to determine with a can of soda or a ready-made meal, it is less obvious for, say, a packet of biscuits. Depending on how it is measured, of course, a portion makes all the difference between a responsible snack and a red light. “It certainly should be possible by one means or another to come up with an agreed portion size,” Geoff Thompson, a Danone executive, said recently.
But industry has squandered its credibility after tricks such as presenting a 100g chocolate bar as two portions and not one. Nor is science much help. Barbara Livingstone, a professor at the University of Ulster argues that portion size is in flux, and even changes depending on the “context” in which consumers eat – at home, for example, as against a restaurant.
“I think we’re only beginning to appreciate that consumers’ behaviour in relation to portion size is very complex,” she says, raising the question of whether Brussels’ labellers had again bitten off more than they could chew
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Written by JOSHUA CHAFFIN in Brussels
Published: March 15 2010 19:03 | Last updated: March 15 2010 19:03
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010 at:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a0b3f988-3063-11df-bc4a-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=rss&nclick_check=1
Picture: It is a paint from Lee Woods ( from Cornwall, U.K.) and it's called
"Science and Progress in the Auvergne" © by Lee Woods
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