As I read Xaq Frohlich’s excellent history of the nutrition label, I started obsessing over every nutrition label I saw. I was used to glimpsing at the calories, but now that habit required unpacking. Which parts of the label mattered to me, and why? Where did the serving size come from? Do people really count out twenty-five goldfish crackers before eating them? And more to the point, why does anything about the label look the way it does, and why does it include (and exclude) the pieces of information that it does?
In From Label to Table, Frohlich explains how the nutrition label, “a mundane object that at first appears fairly straightforward,” actually “encodes a complicated politics based on backstage expert decision-making” (2). Drawing from food studies, legal history, and science, technology and society studies, Frohlich tells a history of how consumers in the United States came to trust packaged...
University of California Press