Even in the 90s artificial dyes already had a bad reputation. The manufacturers must have considered removal and it's shocking to me that their analysis must have guided them to keep them in despite nobody really asking for them. I guess people love bright colors.
What people say they want and what people choose to buy are very different things.
If you ask people "Do you want ____" in isolation, they'll always say "No" if they thing you're asking about has any negative connotation.
If you put two different products on the shelf next to each other that differ by that same thing and even advertise it prominently (e.g. one says "No artifical dyes or coloring") most people would probably choose the brighter one because, at time of purchase, their reveleaed preferences are actually different. Now add an extra $0.10 to the retail price for sourcing more expensive natural colorings and even more people will choose the artificial coloring version.
This pattern plays out prominently in all things food related. If you ask people "Do you wish the food supply was healthier?" everyone is going to tell you "Yes". Then when they're deciding where to go for lunch or what to order, they'll skip right past the healthy items and choose what tastes the best.
These hypothetical free-lunch questions are useless because consumers will always claim they don't want the thing they don't understand. If you ask people if they want their food to be "preservative free" they'll tell you yes, until they see their food going bad immediately and their options dry up. Ask if they want "anti caking agents" removed from food and they'll emphatically agree, until their shredded cheese is sticking together. Food science and popular opinion are two different worlds.
> What people say they want and what people choose to buy are very different things.
As the mac & cheese box featuring Super Mario in the article hints, a big chunk of these people are children. Is it any surprise they don't make the most rational of choices?
On the other hand, this is like asking an alcoholic if he wishes to quit drinking. He'll say yes, but then go into a bar on his way home from work... People claim to want to be healthy, yet their discipline isn't perfect and their will is not iron - what hypocrites!
On the third hand - people do vote and lobby for what they say they want (in this case banning artificial dyes). Why should we give preference to their decisions in the market, vs. their decisions in the voting booth? Or in other words - why do purchasing decisions reveal preference, but voting decisions do not?
The problem historically was that when consumers were given detailed ingredient labels, they often decided to not purchase the products. Chemical and food manufacturers spent vast amounts of money to get ingredient labels watered down so that consumers wouldn't see the chemical names. In the 70s labels were much more detailed.
Labels like "natural flavors" exist to cover up what's actually in the food. "natural vanilla flavoring" sounds much nicer than "vanillin and acetovanillone extracted from waste sawdust".
It's goes back even further. Artificial dyes already had bad reputations by the late 70s.
In the mid-late 70s labels on foods and cleaning products told you exactly what was in them. I remember because my father was an organic chemist by training, and he would look at most labels and explain what was in them, and why we weren't buying them. (My family ended up shopping for most of our groceries at organic food stores.)
It turns out that a lot of people didn't want those ingredients either, and it was impacting sales, so companies successfully lobbied to get the disclosure requirements watered down. These days labels in the US basically tell you nothing.
I studied organic chemistry in college, and there's little as disturbing to me as "natural flavors" or "natural colorings". You have no idea what the chemicals are, what they were extracted from, how they were extracted, and what compounds/processes were used in the extraction. It's a non-label that tells you nothing about what's actually in the food.
We should be entitled by law to know what we're consuming, so that we can actually make informed decisions, and industrial food manufacturers don't want us to know, and have spent vast sums of money to ensure that we can't easily find out.
> In the mid-late 70s labels on foods and cleaning products told you exactly what was in them.
This is not true, and for some reason this seems to be a common urban myth.
The distinction between natural and artificial flavors goes back to 1906, and in 1938 there was a stronger law requiring the disclosure of artificial flavoring, color, or preservatives. I don't know if you're referring to the 1958 Food Additives and Amendment Act, but that didn't really affect ingredient listings either -- it was about food safety, not disclosure. But there was nothing substantially different about ingredient listings between the 1970s and today. I honestly don't know where you got this information, or what kind of ingredients you were under the impression that your father was able to analyze. The 1960s and 1970s was definitely the era when awareness around these things began to grow among consumers, so it definitely helps explain your father's attention to these things. But the idea that disclosure requirements have been watered down, or that this is due to corporate lobbying, is something like an urban legend. There are certainly issues around trade regulation and naming, like which species of fish are or are not allowed to be labeled as catfish, similar to how champagne can only come from a particular region of France. So there is definitely massive lobbying around geographical disclosures and naming. But the idea that there has been some kind of massive shift of disclosure in terms of chemicals is just not true. If you look up the ingredients on actual historical processed snack labels from the 1970s, they're not any different from today.
> I studied organic chemistry in college, and there's little as disturbing to me as "natural flavors" or "natural colorings". You have no idea what the chemicals are, what they were extracted from, how they were extracted, and what compounds/processes were used in the extraction. It's a non-label that tells you nothing about what's actually in the food
Ironically, this is what the legislation is moving toward: Anything "natural" is good, while anything "chemical" is bad to a lot of the world.
"natural flavors" and "natural coloring" is also aggravating when you have food allergies. An example is paprika, which is sometimes listed and sometimes not. I hate that practice so much
It's not just the bright colors. The color of food greatly influences our perception of it. My grandmother was a caterer for many years, and she would tell me that the main difference between a chocolate cake and a vanilla one, is that one is brown. If you colored a cake brown, people would start to perceive it a chocolate.
2004 eastern US reporting in, can confirm the school Mountain dew conspiracy. I wonder if there's a site dedicated to tracking these kind of pre-social media viral memes and conspiracies. (I should say 'mass' social media since myspace was a thing, just barely anyone used it)
