I would love to see the implementation of two symbols in food merchandising to help consumers make ethical choices.
I would love to see an A and a P employed to indicate that the food so marked includes, respectively, animal-derived ingredients or animal products. It would be much easier to use these symbols only in a negative sense, to indicate absence of animals or animal products. Or you could design it as a positive/negative system where the symbols show the varied makeup: animal product but no animal, animal but no animal products, animal and animal products both, neither animal nor animal products. This information could be easily communicated by printing an A and P in red circles on the packaging of the product. A diagonal strike-through would mean absence of that category of ingredient. So a simple binary system with that. This could help vegetarians and vegans find products quickly, without having to read tiny ingredients lists.
It takes so much time to scrutinize ingredients and find those "hidden" animal components like lecithin. Is it animal-derived lecithin or soy(a) lecithin? Ugh.
And here's an idea to make you super-rich if you are enterprising and tech-savvy. Design a phone app which reads ingredients lists in stores to assist shoppers in this process. Have a database which instantly scans all ingredients for safety, healthiness and vegetarian/vegan evaluation. So the consumer could just pick up the product in the grocery store, swipe the phone over it and then instantly get a spoken feedback letting them know the issues of concern for that particular product. In other words, cut out the laborious reading/Googling/reading that food evaluation requires.
Postscript: Oh. I see apps actually do exist that do most of what I describe above. Maybe the "UPC Food Scanner" app is closest to the one I'm imagining. It does scan the products and you can get it to check those ingredients lists for allergies. I'm not sure it does all the other particularizing with the "A" and the "P" I mention above, or whether it scans those lists for "controversial" ingredients. I wonder if the UPC only works with better known product lines? I was thinking more along the lines of optical recognition technology of the ingredients list itself. "Fooditive" and "Open Label" also look like interesting food apps.
I would love to see an A and a P employed to indicate that the food so marked includes, respectively, animal-derived ingredients or animal products. It would be much easier to use these symbols only in a negative sense, to indicate absence of animals or animal products. Or you could design it as a positive/negative system where the symbols show the varied makeup: animal product but no animal, animal but no animal products, animal and animal products both, neither animal nor animal products. This information could be easily communicated by printing an A and P in red circles on the packaging of the product. A diagonal strike-through would mean absence of that category of ingredient. So a simple binary system with that. This could help vegetarians and vegans find products quickly, without having to read tiny ingredients lists.
It takes so much time to scrutinize ingredients and find those "hidden" animal components like lecithin. Is it animal-derived lecithin or soy(a) lecithin? Ugh.
And here's an idea to make you super-rich if you are enterprising and tech-savvy. Design a phone app which reads ingredients lists in stores to assist shoppers in this process. Have a database which instantly scans all ingredients for safety, healthiness and vegetarian/vegan evaluation. So the consumer could just pick up the product in the grocery store, swipe the phone over it and then instantly get a spoken feedback letting them know the issues of concern for that particular product. In other words, cut out the laborious reading/Googling/reading that food evaluation requires.
Postscript: Oh. I see apps actually do exist that do most of what I describe above. Maybe the "UPC Food Scanner" app is closest to the one I'm imagining. It does scan the products and you can get it to check those ingredients lists for allergies. I'm not sure it does all the other particularizing with the "A" and the "P" I mention above, or whether it scans those lists for "controversial" ingredients. I wonder if the UPC only works with better known product lines? I was thinking more along the lines of optical recognition technology of the ingredients list itself. "Fooditive" and "Open Label" also look like interesting food apps.
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