Gotta give a quick shout out to “everywoman” Michelle Obama, who yesterday was kind enough to introduce the administration’s new, improved nutrition labels for food packages. The new labels are designed to make shopping less difficult for easily confused moms who are flummoxed by nutrition labels.
The “bewildering” dilemma women have been experiencing in grocery stores, was described by Michelle Obama, thus:
“So there you stood, alone in some aisle in a store, the clock ticking away at the precious little time remaining to complete your weekly grocery shopping, and all you could do was scratch your head, confused and bewildered, and wonder, is there too much sugar in this product? Is 50 percent of the daily allowance of riboflavin a good thing or a bad thing? And how on Earth could this teeny little package contain five whole servings?
“This stream of questions and worries running through your head when all you really wanted to know was, should I be eating this or not? Is this good for my kids or not? And if it is healthy, how much of it should I be eating? But unless you had a thesaurus, a calculator, a microscope, or a degree in nutrition, you were out of luck. So you felt defeated, and you just gave up and went back to buying the same stuff you always buy.
Good grief. How neurotic does she think the average American shopper is?
The worries running through my head have more to do with the increasing prices of the food items than what the packages tells me about the serving size. I’ll decide what the serving size is, thank you.
To combat this imagined confusion and consternation in the nation’s grocery aisles, the Obama administration has proposed that the calorie counts on the labels be in much larger, bolder print and consumers would know whether foods have added sugars.
Also, serving sizes are being updated to make them more realistic. Okay. Whoopty-doo.
Meanwhile, another American “everywoman” was recently featured by CBS news…
Writer Jen Singer, the mother of two teenage boys, wrestles with her grocery list every week to keep the household budget from getting away from her.
“I’d like the government to stop by my house, come food shopping with me and see where the real costs are,” she said.
The adage “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” is impossible thanks to apple prices, she said.
“We go through one of these every few days,” she said, holding a loaf of bread. “It’s a big part of my take home pay.”
Something tells me Jen is a little more concerned with the price of that bread than its riboflavin content.
While the government says prices are up 6.4 percent since 2011, chicken is up 18.4 percent, ground beef is up 16.8 percent and bacon has skyrocketed up 22.8 percent, making it a holiday when it’s on sale.
“Oh my god!” Singer said as she spied bacon for $3.“The things that are going up in price are the things I absolutely need to buy,” she said. “It’s the meat, it’s the milk, it’s the eggs and it’s getting out of hand.”
The good news is, while you’re breaking the bank paying for all the higher food prices, (thanks to Obama’s government induced inflation) you’ll have no problem at all spotting the calorie counts.
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