5 Words On Food Labels You Shouldn't Get Fooled By

It's all a cheap marketing trick meant to shine up that Shiraz from Nebraska's fourth-finest winery, but it's more than consumers who are getting ripped off. The wineries have to pay for the stickers they put on the bottles, so it's in a competition's interests to hand out as many awards as possible. Drink what you want, but don't feel obligated to pay extra for the bottle with the fanciest stickers. After all, you're not gonna notice the difference between an 87-point bronze and a 91-point silver when you're pairing it with Kraft Mac and Cheese.

Which is nice, but unnecessary, because the USDA doesn't allow hormones to be added to chicken or hogs anyway. So when chicken or pork products proudly state "No hormones or steroids added," they somehow neglect to credit the USDA for giving them that fantastic idea. Then mandating it via federal law.

They might as well proclaim "No additional anthrax added!" They can't do that in the first place, and yes, they want a medal for it.

At least there's a handy trick for identifying hidden trans fats. If a product contains hydrogenated oils, those are trans fats. But since the total comes out to 0.49 grams or less, companies can say there's none. So you end up with something like this package of butter spread:

Andrea Donsky We kind of believe it's not butter.

It contains both hydrogenated soybean oil and hydrogenated cottonseed oil. Butter your toast with that, and you're starting your day sucking up the devil of fats.

It's also a completely meaningless term, as there's no regulation in the U.S. that determines what can be called sushi-grade. When it comes to beef, the USDA is all over that shit. We got "Prime," "Choice," "Select," and "Standard" -- the "miscellaneous quadruped" of meat. Same deal goes with pork and poultry ... but not for the chicken of the sea. Or the anything of the sea.

Any fish can be "sushi-grade." All it takes is someone with a sharp knife and no oven. Maybe the chef really did pick only the finest fish the market had that day, or maybe the grocery store is reasonably sure that the fish is fresh enough that eating it raw won't give you parasites. Have fun gambling on that!

Well, it's a great marketing term, and ... oh, that's it.

Literally all "multigrain" means is that the bread contains multiple grains, not that any of those grains are necessarily good or healthy. After all, both whole wheat and white bread start out as grain; it's just that whole wheat has fiber and other healthy properties. Multigrain bread could be decently healthy, or it could be (and probably is) a Frankenstein amalgamation of different processed grains, all of which have no more nutritional value than the slice of cake we call white bread. Those grains sprinkled on top of your loaf make it look nice, but they're basically disappointing sprinkles.

This phenomenon is not confined to the bread aisle. For example, a few years ago, Pringles rolled out a line of "healthy" multigrain chips. Their marketing director said they were targeting people 35 and up, who were more interested in counting calories than their younger counterparts. Right after he made his claims to The New York Times, the paper followed up by noting that multigrain Pringles "have about the same amount of sodium and calories as regular Pringles." "Multigrain" is an industry code word for "edible mulch."

Nathan Kamal lives in Oregon and writes there. He co-founded Asymmetry Fiction for all your fiction needs. Did you like this article? Do you want to like Mike Bedard even more? Go ahead and follow him on Twitter, then. Hungry for additional mind-blowing content? See Markos' Twitter. When E.M. Caris is not writing for Cracked, you can read his food writing over at the spice subscription service allyoucanspice.com. Greg Tuff is hoping to get on the new season of Big Brother Canada, because things are going great ... Talk him out of it on Twitter.

Food is food, but it should still be eaten out of a quality lunchbox from Herschel.

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