sweets to the sweet

So, y'know Snapple? "Made from the best stuff on earth," and all that shit? Anyway, get this: a woman in New Jersey sued Snapple because they advertise their beverages to be "All Natural" when in fact they are sweetened with high fructose corn syrup, "a highly processed sugar substitute." Now, from any reasonable person's view, and speaking in a layman's terminology, she was totally in the right. Snapple's entire image is about being healthy and, more importantly, NATURAL. I mean, take one look at their website (though I wouldn't stay too long—the music is completely irritating). There's a whole little "book," complete with three pages of references, on the history and health benefits of tea—that's tea in general, mind you; I don't know how that compares in reality with the history and processes involved in creating Snapple's teas. Anyway, it's clear that a major component in Snapple's image is the idea of being "all natural." And HFCS is about as far from "natural" as you can get, unless of course, you're speaking in the technical, legal sense of the term, in which case, it's now officially A-OK, because, that's right, the lady from New Jersey lost the case. (You can check out the official court decision here.) HFCS is now officially a "natural" ingredient.

Of course, what is or isn't "natural" in a legal, what-you-can-or-cannot-put-on-a-food-label sense, is a complete load of bullshit, from any normal person's perspective. If you don't know what I'm talking about, do a Google search for "natural flavors"—this article is one that's pretty good. In a nutshell: "Consumers pay a lot for natural flavorings. But these are in fact no better in quality, nor are they safer, than their cost-effective artificial counterparts." They're the same chemicals, folks, just extracted from different sources and processed in different ways. And yet, many people will pay more for products that are labeled as "all natural" simply because they think that is some guarantee of healthiness. (The standards for "organic" products are stricter, but still a bit convoluted in places—it's all a very fascinating topic that you shouldn't get me started on unless you want to hear a rant.) It is, in short, a completely deceptive mode of business, which remains completely legal. And now, the FDA has given Snapple and other companies that use HFCS (which is the sweetener in basically every processed food EVER) a nice big boost by saying definitively that it, too, can be considered "natural."

Of course, you probably didn't hear about the court decision or the FDA's letter changing their minds on HFCS (they'd previously said they would not consider it a "natural" ingredient). I only stumbled across the link by chance on a vegetarian blog I happen to lurk on every now and then; I don't see anything about it on any of the major news sites or anything like that. But what you may hear (or see) is the ad campaign that is being launched by the Corn Refiners' Association. You can bet they're going to milk this for all it's worth.

Oh, and, I have to throw this in—part of the Corn Refiners' Association website is a chart comparing sugar, honey, and HFCS, as well as two types of "artificial" sweeteners, and at the bottom, in the "What's it made from?" field, it mentions that "Most honey is now imported from China," while throwing in that the corn used to make HFCS is "primarily grown in the United States." Not only is that completely irrelevant to the question ("What's it made from?" not "Where does it come from?") it manages to smear all honey everywhere by relating it to the recent issues with Chinese imports (seriously, it's pretty easy to tell which brands come from where—it says so right on the bottle) while planting that tiny little seed of goodness in the mind on the side of the HFCS—made in the USA! Woo! Of course, the corn industry is basically the opposite of "good" for the US economy as a whole, but they conveniently forget to mention that.

Further reading: Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser and The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan (the first chapter of that one is especially relevant here). Seriously kids. Go read these books, and tell your friends, so I can quit annoying people with my rants about food.

*EDIT* Apparently there was an article about the decision in the Wall Street Journal, which, I suppose, counts as a "major news source." I beg a thousand pardons.