Read the Label! Nutella Has Ingredients

Most of the time when I sit down to write an essay for this blog (and apologies, to those of you who like reading it, for the three-week hiatus), I am indulging my belief that I have some worthwhile insights to share. Not this time. This is a rant, pure and simple.

As you know from reading my last entry ("Evil on the Back of Your Phone Book"), plaintiffs' trial lawyers are not my favorite people in the world. But what about the plaintiffs themselves? Some of them are every bit as outrageous - or worse.

Take the example of Athena Hohenberg, a California mother who initiated a class-action lawsuit against the makers of Nutella. For those of you who've never tried Nutella, I recommend you do so. It is a soft spread made from ground up hazel nuts (a.k.a. filberts) and cocoa. Do not take my advice if you are allergic to tree nuts, because if you do that and sue me, I will be forced to decide whether you should be drawn and quartered or boiled in oil. (Pick one: it really makes no sense to do both.)

Nutella's advertising suggests you can put this stuff on toast and have it as part of a good breakfast. The key words in that sentence are "advertising" and "part." If you don't know that advertising, by its very nature, includes claims that are exaggerated or misleading, then you have just arrived in Western society from God-knows-where.

Hohenberg was reportedly appalled when she discovered that the stuff she was feeding her four-year-old daughter was not the most healthful choice possible and decided to sue Nutella for deceiving her.

And the judge assigned to the case presided over a settlement that awarded some $3 million dollars, most of it to people who will make the effort to fill out paperwork claiming they were also deceived, just to get up to $20 back, but a nice chunk of money for Hohenberg, too. (I really hope she puts it in a trust fund to pay for her daughter's college, although if little Hohenberg has the smarts to get into a university in the UC system, she won't need it. But I digress.)

Nutella has agreed to change the product's labeling and its advertising. Specifically, they have agreed to put nutritional information on the front of the package, to assist those who have some sort of disability - I'm still researching this aspect of the case - that makes it impossible for them to turn the jar around and read the quite-large-enough print on the back that tells you exactly what Nutella's nutritional characteristics are.

Surely you've seen commercials for children's breakfast cereals that tell you the cereal can be part of a nutritious breakfast. You know, without even looking, that the first ingredient on the cereal box is sugar and that the nutritious part of what's in that bowl pictured on the box is the milk. (Yes, I know the vegans will disagree.)

If you had never heard of Nutella and believed, based on your knowledge of linguistics, that it is an intimate, diminutive nickname for a nutty lover ("Ah, Sophia, my little Nutella...."), you could still pick up a jar of it and tell, right away, that it's a far cry from All Bran. You see, the makers of processed foods have to list ingredients. And they have to be listed in order of how much of the product consists of them.

So if the first ingredient is sugar, that means there is more sugar in the product than any other single ingredient. I am reminded of a Peanuts comic strip. Sally says to Linus, "I don't know if we should eat this cereal. It's full of ingredients." But that list is your friend if you want to know what you're eating. And the Nutella label lists sugar, palm oil, hazelnuts, and cocoa before it gets to skim milk.

So if Athena Hohenberg was deceived, by marketing, into serving Nutella to her daughter for breakfast and was not dissuaded from doing so by the plain, simple information on the label, she doesn't need an attorney. She needs a tin foil hat to protect her from TV commercials and prayers from all of us that her daughter won't grow up to be just as ditzy as her mother.

Maybe she isn't really ditzy. Maybe she really did this out of a sense of social responsibility and the notion that the manufacturer of a processed food should be held accountable for the truthfulness of its advertising. Maybe it had nothing to do with greed on her part or that of her attorney. And maybe I will win this year's Nobel prize for outstanding contributions to the blogosphere.

Ditzy ... greedy ... or a social do-gooder. There really is no way to know. But what we do know is that we are fools if we expect marketing to tell us the straight story. If we are not skeptical enough to ignore the claims on the TV commercials and read the labels - and teach our children to do the same - then all the class-action suits the lawyers can dream up will not save us from our own stupidity.