From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age

As history, From Label to Table stands in contrast to the conventional public policy book. Due to the mix of government and market rules governing food labels, Xaq Frohlich focuses not only on the legislation and rulemaking of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) expert “gatekeepers” but also on market actors and consumers. He also devotes much time to describing scientific developments (like artificial sweeteners) and socioeconomic developments (like the “silent salesman” of food packages) used in historically conceptualizing and building food labels. His emphasis on the development of momentum and an informational record, such as FDA hearings or White House conferences at which advocacy fliers circulated, and on innovations in marketing provides a much more robust picture of the backstory, in which legislation or rules are just the very end of a long, social process. Frohlich connects the dots with an entire project that moves from FDA management of food markets, notions of appropriate control by the state, and changing expert conceptions of the consumer to a conclusion that the consumer has now been changed too.As other scholars have written, this particular policy trajectory is quite elementary, moving in mainly three stages. The regulatory culture has moved from a focus on adulteration, especially alternative medicine (1880s–1920s), to a focus on standards and standard understandings and identification of ingredients (1930s–60s), to the present emphasis on informative labels and information regulation (1970s–present). Frohlich claims that the FDA redefined the food label as a “public platform” (9) to promote choice and consumer self-care. This “government brand” (49), as it was called, contrasts with private brands in the information infrastructure, such as political party platforms or Gallup polls. In the chapter titled “A Government Brand,” Frohlich meticulously explains the evolution of the food label from its 1993 inception to its transformation in 2003 into the “Nutrition Facts” format we still see today. As Frohlich illuminates, the label created “new discourses about the burden of disease” in a single informational panel (154). As a history of information regulation, Frohlich's novel conclusion is that this regulation matters even when consumers do not read the label. The label becomes part of the cognitive space, language, and conceptualization of food, health, and marketing.Key actors are experts, consumers, and marketers. Frohlich's focus is on experts and expert institutions (such as scientists and the FDA) who needed to legitimize their authority and come up with a way to communicate science and risk to nonexpert consumers. Consumers experience a changing social construction, such as the savvy housewife, who has values, is informed, and is rational. Not that industry does not figure heavily into the narrative. In a world where the free market provides the food, industry will be a prominent partner in the creation and execution of the information environment. Marketers cocreated labels with the experts, using labels and packaging not only to distinguish their product in a hypercompetitive food economy but also as a marketing device to make health information a feature of food, such as “heart healthy” in the 1980s or “certified organic” in the 1990s.Culturally, Frohlich explains the role of the label as a means of replacing historic forms of trust in a mediated food economy due to the sheer scale of the mass economy. He notes that supermarkets became the contested space for advocates and scientific debates about consumer efficacy. Labels became the primary way to display ingredients and even unit pricing. In connecting these two points, I was struck by the development of the local foods movement to address both trust and producer/consumer exploitation. Nutrition labels are not present at farmer's markets. They have been replaced by historic forms of trust and information. In Frohlich's thinking, this would mimic earlier times when a consumer would ask a trusted grocer for information or negotiate the price based on a conversation.The politics and social use of food labels has seen quite a bit of innovation globally. In contrast to American technical approaches, other nations have focused on public health with clear directives, such as prominently displaying red or green symbols on the front of packages to categorize foods as “unhealthful” or “good to eat,” respectively. Frohlich's catalog of the delicate history and situation of a decentralized political economy with multiple government, private, and commercial organizations explains much of the difference between the obtuse, hands-off American approach and the direct interventions of other regimes. Frohlich categorizes recent trends of “opt out” labels, such as “non-GMO” or “organic,” but these controversies similarly document a policy terrain of multiple stakeholders with meaningful power compromising toward a general policy. This is partly because, as Frohlich notes, the goal was a “romanticized, albeit ahistorical” view of natural food, which policy could only approximate, not deliver (180). His analysis ends with a paradox: in spite of there being more labels, consumers are confused and less informed than ever. Yet, if the goal is trust, it strikes me that consumer gravitation toward local food and grower knowledge is a way to bypass this government intervention altogether, a somewhat enduring tradition of independent agency in American political economy.In the space of food and technology studies, as well as the history of modern intellectual property law, Frohlich's contribution uses label policy history to demonstrate a special theoretical understanding of the role of experts in building informational infrastructures—like the nutrition facts label—that shape the informational environment and decision-making context of ordinary citizens, in this case, food consumers. This theoretical approach led me to consider other actors who might also build “informational infrastructures” that shape the citizen's information environment and decision-making, and I find Frohlich's notions, laid out in a concrete context, transferable to a variety of historical studies. In political history, the invention of party platforms and the advent of pollsters and use of opinion polls, such as those conducted by Gallup, come to mind as examples one could apply using his “informational infrastructures” framework of analysis. From Label to Table's theoretical contribution is just as useful as the history with which it is tested.