Should Beer Be Required to List Ingredients?
Update: Commenters have made the point that a bottled-on date would be even more useful than ingredients. I completely agree, and I'm actually working on a piece about that now.
This meme has been floating around for the past few months:
Hari has been on the case for awhile and when her concerns first surfaced, they were uninformed and attracted some sniggering. On the other hand, I see absolutely no reason why we shouldn't know what's in our beer. Most people won't care, and some people will be incensed by uncontroversial ingredients (like Hari's objection to isinglass). Others will (correctly) complain that listing ingredients like corn won't reveal whether it's GMO corn, and still others will (correctly) note that ingredients don't reveal the whole picture about how beers are maltreated. And yet all of those quibbles are beside the point. The only reason breweries would oppose this is to conceal what they're putting in your beer, and that seems reason enough to compel them to reveal all.
Sunlight is good.
This meme has been floating around for the past few months:
An online petition to change that — asking Anheuser-Busch and Miller Coors to post their beer product ingredients online — is being spearheaded by influential food blogger and nutritional activist Vani Hari, creator of FoodBabe.com.
At issue: It's the Treasury Department — not the Food and Drug Administration — that regulates beer. So the beer giants are not required to post ingredients on their labels or on their websites. [FoodBabe creator Vani] Hari says even though the law doesn't require it, consumers have a right to know what's in the beer they drink. And she wants the beer giants to post it on their websites.
Source |
Sunlight is good.