Last update - 00:00 05/09/2006
Eating Well 22 / Little print, big problems
By Rachel Talshir
Until I started to eat only healthful food I was attracted by the big print on food packaging. Since then I have read only the fine print and ignored the bigger stuff. The small letters detail the ingredients of the product; the big ones scream out the manufacturer's recommendations. The fine print is often as tiny as the footprints of an ant; the big print is colorful, garish, emphatic.
To read the big print on the packages is like asking a tailor what he thinks about the emperor's new clothes. To read the fine print is to become acquainted with all kinds of preservatives, lactates, food coloring, and flavor and aroma enhancers.
Not everyone likes the fine print and what it reveals. Indeed, A., a friend and a person who loves to cook, refuses to read it. "As far as I am concerned," he says, "the fine print doesn't exist. I don't want to know what it says. I'm afraid it will ruin my appetite."
Indeed, a plunge into this realm - which we always knew existed but which some us preferred to ignore - is not unlike taking up an extreme sport: exhilarating but scary and fraught with risks. What are preservatives, anyway? They sound like something that is intended to protect something. There are so many types of them - who can possibly know what each of them contains and which have been checked? What is food coloring? Does the fact that we eat something make it edible?
The plunge into the fine print that describes food coloring is exhilarating and fascinating because it invokes more and more horror. You don't have to move a muscle; all you have to do is strain your eyes and focus on the minuscule letters, each of them about the size of a grain of sand. You will read that some types of food coloring are petroleum-based, some contain nitric acids, some have a component called benzene, which the Ministry of Health says causes certain damage. When you start to probe, two questions automatically arise: Why do we continue to ignore these things? And, why is it that the more important the information is, the smaller the print and the more obscure the codes?
The list of ingredients that is supposed to provide information is frequently confusing and full of tricks. For example, what is E-129? It's allura red, a food-coloring agent that can cause a host of illnesses. Why the "E"? It refers to Europe. Why "129"? It's no more than a serial number. Thus E-129 is the serial number of this substance according to the European standard. Israeli law allows manufacturers to state "food coloring" without specifying what it contains.
The big print tells you that this is a health snack, but the fine print tells a different tale. The big print declares that the package contains a snack bar from the vegetable kingdom, but the fine print denies any such connection. Colorful cookies in a glittering wrapper from Germany begin to turn into sly, cunning monsters after one reads the microscopic print and examines what it's referring to.
Sometimes, after you read the fine print you get a strong and uneasy feeling that everything that's printed in big letters is meant solely to dazzle and to divert attention. Once you start to read the fine print on food packaging, however, it becomes a habit and you start to read it on everything: on cosmetics, on cleaning fluids, on natural medicines, on electrical appliances. You get into it. Gradually you discover that the small letters expose big things and that the big letters are there, shiny and boisterous, only to hide the small ones.
The character of the big letters and the disparity between them and the small ones is very similar to human nature: People who scream that they are cool are hardly ever cool. People who are cool have no need to say so, let alone scream it out.
Guides for the perplexed
If you are reading the fine print on food products, you may well go on to do likewise with respect to cleaning and grooming products. There are numerous guides on the Internet about all the types of fine print.
For the "top 20 food additives to avoid," see: http://altmedangel.com/additive/htm ?(in English?).
Two helpful sites in Hebrew are: www.zom.co.il/harmful-food.htm and www.derech.net/ecology_poisons.htm.