Junk food manufacturers depend on the addictive nature of the sugar and fat they cram into their products. I don't see how this is any different than cigarette warning labels.
Sometimes I buy sugar free corn flakes and although they should be cheaper theoretically, in reality they cost a multiple of the super sugary flakes. It would be great if we could get more products that aren’t sweetened when you buy them. Like corn flakes, cereal, bread, chocolate milk and lot of others.
This is a grocery store and grocery distribution consolidation/duopoly/monopoly problem, which is a separate issue than the food that is sold.
This is actually one reason I love FBA - I can buy all sorts of small brand specialty health foods from Amazon, bypassing what the local stores choose to stock (or, more often, not stock).
Amazon's anticompetitive practices mean this will become harder in the future however, as they will use this sales and pricing and customer data directly against any mom and pop product that becomes sufficiently successful.
We really need better protections for small businesses that sell via giant online platforms. There is no shortage of healthy, tasty food, people who want to sell it, or people who want to buy it.
Hehe, a while ago I embarked on a quest to find the lowest-added-sugar corn flakes.
6 or 7 supermarket chains further, sometimes a dozen products in same category, end result: not one (0) without added sugars. Anywhere. And all in a similar range, iirc.
So basically the same product everywhere. Just minor tweaks (or with/without chocolate, eg.) + packaging, brands & pricing differences.
Just goes to show how powerful food conglomerates destroy consumer choice.
I assume a lot of food is produced like toothpaste. I used to know a guy whose dad had a factory that produced toothpaste and shampoo for almost all big brands. They did R&D for them and just put slightly different recipes into the branded boxes. That means that a lot of shampoos and toothpaste (and probably) are basically only slight variations of the same thing.
Corn flakes and chocolate milk (I'm so confused by the mention of this) are junk food products made with sugar. It makes no sense to have them sugar free. As for cereal and bread, it should be trivially easy to find these without added sugar. I don't know where you live but I'm confident you can find these.
It's still compelled speech. It's possible that you think commercial communications are a special case, but I and many others do not, and find it just as reprehensible as any other form of compelled speech.
What other sorts of solutions are possible other than forcing people to put things on their packaging that they don't want there?
(1) it's not speech. (2) it's not political. (3) it is essential information for consumers that manufacturers have routinely lied about in the past. (4) it is already a compromise between what manufacturers would like and what 'the people' (you know, those pesky voters and their representatives) actually need. And finally (5) corporations already have outsized power, to carry their water to the point that you believe that documents a few hundred years old should be interpreted in the most literal way possible so that they can have even more power is not rational.
A ton of court decisions say it is in the US. Here is an article that cites a plethora of them [1]. Note: I have no idea who gfi.org is or whose agenda they are pushing or what side they are on. They just happened to have an article with a nice list of relevant cases.
Corporations are people, writing is speech and right is wrong. I actually don't care about what convoluted reasoning US courts use to reach their conclusions, they seem to be far more involved in seeing how they can kick the camel through the eye of the needle than with what was originally intended. Such incredibly narrow (and often narrowminded) views as well as all kinds of myopic rulings have done a lot of damage to the United States and to the world at large either by example or by osmosis.
So if you want to argue that being required to label the ingredients and other required prose on the outside of your packaging is 'speech' then you are effectively siding with the corporations against humanity. You can probably find some justification for that in your own mind but it isn't going to convince me that you have it right, no matter how many silly arguments you can find to back it up. There is such a thing as common sense and courts risk their own legacy as well as ridicule if they lose that very important element. And in the United States the supposedly independent supreme courts vote o n just about any subject that is even mildly politically tinted can be guessed with an accuracy that borders on certainty, something that should never ever happen if the court were independent.
This sort of reasoning is what got you 'the United States vs $50,000' and other elegant bits of bullshit. And don't get me started on the political nature of the US supreme court, which seems to be visible to all but a handful.
A significant amount of the article is about efforts to bring similar regulations to the US, and the likely challenges that will face, including a specific mention of the US approach to speech.
It is perfectly legal for compelled speech to exist in business activity, and is well within the interstate commerce clause.
As one of those evil American conservatives, I'm perfectly okay with targeted compelled speech in business activities, such as requiring marketing to be truthful.
But if they say nothing on the package, they're truthful, no? And it's more power to the FDA, a big government agency. Also, it's regulations. Those are bad for free markets, no? That's my understanding of the US culture (both liberals and conservative btw, I don't see meaningful difference between the two economically).
It's a very shallow understanding of US culture, but that's fair enough because CNN/Fox/MSM and other political outlets are a very shallow display of US culture.
Very few conservatives would be upset with the FDA being focused on "truth in packaging" as opposed to "FDA-approved" translating to "force employers/schools to force this on everyone" (aka experimental COVID shots).
Very few conservatives want to remove all regulation - many I know like the safety of the banking system as opposed the scam-heavy crypto market. However, we don't like over-zealous political enforcement of regulations (aka IRS doing targeted audits on conservative leaning institutions) or every transaction being reported to the government.
You are correct there isn't a meaningful economic difference between Democrats and Republicans right now. Both parties are letting inflation run rampant, have done little to fight taxes, deficits, or debts, and have no sense of financial responsibility to their taxpayers or voters, even though they both scream it when they are the minority party.
However, most Conservatives care about the federal debt/deficit, even if all the Republicans in the House don't. That's why Congress's approval rating is crap.
