A recent email / petition from CREDO said:
General Mills’ Vanilla, Chocolate and Cinnamon Chex boxes all proudly display a label ... “no high fructose corn syrup.”
...These General Mills products all contain a super-concentrated sweetener that is made from high fructose corn syrup, and within the Big Ag industry is literally called “HFCS-90” or high fructose corn syrup-90.
But then the Corn Refiners Association changed the name to “fructose.”1 And now General Mills is not only disingenuously hiding their corn syrup behind this innocuous alias -- the company is bragging that it’s products don’t contain any!
The CREDO petition asks the company to stop printing that claim on its products. We should also be asking: Isn't this illegal? If not, why not? What are our elected officials doing about it?
Can an industry group establish a standard for its members that the ingredient previously called "sugar" should be listed as "glucose" - and then can companies make statements that those products "do not contain sugar"? Can an industry group decide to refer to alcohol as "joy juice" and then sell those products to minors because they "contain no alcohol"?
OK, those aren't perfect analogies. The "high fructose corn syrup-90" is presumably not in all ways chemically identical to "high fructose corn syrup" - even if the differences aren't significant to anyone avoiding high fructose corn syrup. A lawyer might therefore argue the statement is technically true, even if not very useful. It still seems worthwhile to ask why we don't have legal standards which control the use of "technically true, but not useful" advertising which would tend to cause consumers to buy products they would otherwise avoid.
But the technicality of an insignificant-to-consumers distinction between these two ingredients can be objected to in another way, at least in this particular case. The industry group has chosen to use the word "fructose" when the ingredient is high fructose corn syrop-90. Fructose was an established term for a particular molecule long before the industry group made their decision. Students studying chemistry and/or biology have been expected to identify the word fructose with one particular molecule for decades. High fructose corn syrup-90 isn't identical to pure fructose molecules either. So, the question here isn't just what lawyers say about distinguishing "high fructose corn syrup" and "high fructose corn syrup-90".
We're taught in school that a market economic system is good for us because competition drives companies to make products better and more in keeping with what consumers want. If that is what our government wants the economy to do, then we need accurately-informed consumer choices to influence business improvements to their products. When products are labelled and/or described in ways which are at best misleading, consumers don't know what they are buying, and as a result don't buy what they would have picked if not mislead. Companies are manipulating consumers into buying what the companies want to make, rather than making what consumers really want to buy. The rationale for the market economy falls apart.
If a teenager uses an older brother's ID to buy alcohol, we don't say the fault is all on the store for being fooled by deception. The law wouldn't quibble over the fact the ID had the older brother's name and the older brother was actually old enough to buy alcohol. We shouldn't let businesses fool consumers either. It's not essential if the deception is intentional. If you make the honest mistake of driving off with someone else's car which looks a lot like your car, it doesn't mean you get to keep his car.
Should a product that contains ham be able to say it "contains no pork," because ham has a different texture and flavor than pork chops and pork roasts? Should a product be able to list "corn" as an ingredient if it is made using the stalk of a corn plant? Should a product be able to say it contains grapes based on containing raisins? If a product contains egg, can the list of ingredients say "chicken"? Even if there are good arguments on both sides of these questions, we need rules for package and ad wording so consumers reading the package or ad can know which meaning or meanings are conveyed. To some degree this is already done, but if what CREDO describes is happening it's not being done enough. If the high fructose corn syrup / high fructose corn syrup-90 / fructose free-for-all is just an example of something accidentally falling through the cracks, are our government filling those cracks?
The government is our social organization for mediating disputes between citizens, and which does not have the direct vested interests of an industry group (which could lead the industry group to make choices not in the public interest). It is the government's responsibility to take care of this.
Our politicians have three options. They can continue to support a deceptive market economy which benefits the businesses, but doesn't give the benefits it should to the vast majority. They can start legislating a framework requiring an honest market economy. Or they can try to construct a system which lacks the problems of the market economy.
So far, we know which option our elected officials have chosen over the decades no matter which party has been dominant.