Food buzzwords that are really food bullwords
Terms such as ‘farm to table’, ‘hand-made’ and ‘no sugar added’ can easily mislead consumers
Every year, the bucket of bullshit food claims, terms, labels — whatever you want to call them — gets fuller. This, of course, has been carrying on since words and food were around, but the more disconnected we’ve become from our food production, the easier it is for meaningless puffery to sway our choices. Here’s a small handful of such terms from the bucket o’ crud, which should raise your BS antenna, if it isn’t already twitching.
Farm to table: There was a time when this meant restaurants that sourced their food directly, with no distributor or retail situation in the mix, from best practice and — by necessity local — farms. Of course, it’s quite obvious how the term could be open to the sort of ambiguity that makes it a lie, in a second. And so it now most usually means anyone with an apron and a menu, using food from any farm on the globe, and serving it on any table, as long as said table is suitably rustic looking (chic tableware with rustic undertones helps)...
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