food additives

We get a small win where "food" manufacturers are forced to list their additives on the packaging, but we still lose because they're allowed to list them as obfuscated numbers. What's with that? They're so ashamed of what they put in "food" that they go to extreme lengths to cover it up?

Allowing food colorings, flavorings, texturers, and "enhancers" always seemed to me as legalised lying. It looks, tastes, smells, and feels like the real thing except it isn't. Worse, it might damage your health, but hey, it costs them half a cent to make the packet of crap they flog to you for $2, so damn, they'll do it! It is called freedom (to exploit and lie). Best of all, they can use emotionally laden advertisements to make us think we really want it, so that some of us poor fools will even stick up for the "right" to foist this garbage upon us, ruin our bodies, and enhance corporate bank balances.

I was told a while ago that one of the most profitable businesses (after selling death via the war machine) is in swindling people out of money for flavored, colored water. Though I have a feeling that nothing else even comes close to being as profitable as mass murder. It is so much easier to lie, cheat, and destroy than to actually do something useful.

Ugh! Mostly I'm an optimist, but sometimes I feel sad for us.

http://www.cspinet.org/reports/chemcuisine.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_number
http://www.foodstandards.gov.au/newsroom/publications/shoppersguide/foodadditivesalphaup1679.cfm
http://www.foodstandards.gov.au/newsroom/publications/shoppersguide/foodadditivesnumeric1680.cfm