Food labelling

[ladyofastolat]

Here's something that's annoying. It's when you get a box of chocolates or a selection box of biscuits, and on the back of the packet it lists all the ingredients for the entire selection, and it reads, "stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff, THING THAT MIGHT KILL YOU!, stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff." Inside the box, 20 different chocolates or biscuits stare innocently at you, and you know that at least one of them contains the THING THAT MIGHT KILL YOU! but you have no idea which one(s), or how many. Sometimes one draws your attention by waving dramatically at you, saying LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! I'M COVERED ALL OVER IN NUTS! but maybe it's just a distraction. Maybe it's like all those people in movies who leap out and shout I AM A DIVERSION! FOLLOW ME SO THE HERO WITH THE McGUFFIN WILL GET AWAY! (and the baddies always fall for it! Why? It's always so obviously a diversion, yet they invariably drop everything and chase after these people who so obviously want to be chased. It's almost as if evil minions are invariably stupid, or something. Oh. Wait.)

Anyway, back to those innocent chocolates. One of them obviously has nuts all over it, and another has no obvious nuts, but is called "hazelnut crunch," which is a bit of a clue. But what about all the others? THING THAT MIGHT KILL YOU! was quite high on the ingredient list. Are two chocolates likely to account for it, or is there likely to be more lurking in a third chocolate, invisible and unlabelled?

In the end, you have to pass all doubtful chocolates to a tame Pellinor, who has to take a careful bite and report back on the likelihood of nuts. But can you trust such a creature? There is, after all, that incident in Bella Pasta in Oxford in 1993: that never-to-be-forgivenforgotten incident when you were suddenly stuck with Doubt about the white shavings on your pudding, so passed it over to him to take a tiny spoonful and report back. Then you got distracted by conversation with others, and when you turned back, the whole pudding was gone. "So it did have nuts in it?" you say. "No," says the brazen-faced unrepentant villain, quite cheerfully. "It was white chocolate."

Okay, so nuts won't actually kill me (at least, they haven't yet) but an allergic reaction is unpleasant and not nice, and there's always the fear that it will get worse. Others have it far, far worse, of course. So why, if you're going to make the effort of listing all your allergens in bold on the back of your packet, don't you make it clear inside which item contains said allergen, and which ones are free of it?

Comments

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Because all chocolate and biscuit manufacturers are in the pay of king_pellinor?

[leesa_perrie]

This? This sounds like a plausible conspiracy theory!

[sally_maria]

I wonder if they are mostly concerned with the kind of allergies that mean that even being in close proximity to a nut would be enough to cause a reaction, so basically any nut chocolates in the box would mean they were uneatable.

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Could be. Although that leads me to a related moan. A couple of years ago, I was reading through the Hotel Chocolat Christmas catalogue, and noticed that they had a box specifically labelled as alcohol-free. They had this-allergen-free, and that-allergen-free, but didn't have a single box in the entire catalogue labelled as nut-free.

[leesa_perrie]

I agree with sally_maria, that they're thinking of people who can't be close to nuts and so wouldn't buy the box. Which is unfair of people like yourself, who could eat some of the chocolates if you could be sure they were nut-free!

Your tame Pellinor sounds very untrustworthy to me. Perhaps he needs further taming?! :)

[rawgirl75.livejournal.com]

Could you cut them in half with a knife and look inside?

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

That's fine if the nuts look suitably nutty, but doesn't work with pralines. To the eye, nutty pralines and non nutty truffles can look the same, so you can't tell without eating them. But, yes, I do sometimes have to cut them in half to take a look.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

It is a bit boggling that there are no widely marketed nutless choc selections. It's not exactly an unusual allergy...