LABELS
Some noteworthy changes have taken place in recent years concerning the packaging of foods. One more is needed.
I can sing praises for most of them, but there's one general feature which leaves me wondering. How did they manage to make a small package of six peanut butter or cheese crackers so difficult to open? It used to be that I could get into them easily and some even had a little colored strip one pulled which opened on side of the see-through packet. No more, or maybe I have switched brands without knowing it. Now, they have sealed ends, and they are impossible to tear off, or to tear in two from the edge. scissors are the best and quickest remedy for the problem. If you are, by profession, a tailor or seamstress,and keep a pair of such occupational blades handy at all times for sniping wayward threads and performing other such sartorial maneuvers, you are home free. If not, I have found a good, sharp pencil will do. Insert the graphite point where you think the wrapper may be at its weakest and stab through the clear, plastic covering. Oops! I should have warned you first shouldn't I? That 's right. Never keep your finger behind the focal point of our stab effort. Sorry about that. A Band Aid will help and we can re-sharpen the pencil later. For now, tear the cracker package open and - as it is said: “Enjoy!
I think all the health statistics now required to be printed on the cartons are good features, too, and I also find them good reading, as well.
Line up the boxes of the various dry cereals you like best – your absolute favorite, among them and while you are munching away at a large bowl of our first and only choice, read the charts and compare the values. I don't know how they work it, but our favorite always comes out as he poorest choice of all! Than will be especially true if you are reporting aloud to the family.
Seriously, the facts required on food products we use are a good feature. There is one feature missing which I would like to see included some day in the future when the lawmakers find themselves with nothing to do one afternoon.
I would like to know – or, at least, be given a code which will let me find out, who actually makes the food I'm consuming. It's nice, perhaps, to know who distributes a particular food, but I want know made it; where it came from for them to be able to distribute it. It is not a trade secret trade that food manufacturers, like the makers of other products, manufacture huge quantities of he name brand products, under different or packaging.
Some makers of well-known products make as much profit on
making their product for others to sell. They have no advertising costs, no distribution costs and they realize other savings as well as being able to process a larger volume of the products with increased economy.
It can be in fine print, or available, only through their dot-com address only but it would be helpful if I could know where the food I'm eating was made rather than who distributed it.
A.L.M. October 7, 2002 [c557wds]
