Food-labelling standards are a joke and should be standardised

With all this time spent at home preparing and consuming food, I've been paying a lot more attention to food labelling. I've looked at food labels before, trying to eat less sugar, or feed my children the least unhealthy muesli bar, or some such. Food labels worked well for these narrow questions and I trustfully assumed Australia's food-labelling system was otherwise sensible and designed in the interests of the consumers.

I have had an awakening: it's not. If anything, the net result is because the food-labelling system looks trustworthy, your defences are down and you're more susceptible to advertising and manipulation than if you were buyer beware.

To begin with, think about "serving sizes". The nutritional panel on the packaging of all food lists the content of food per 100 grams and per "serving". One naturally assumes that serving has some meaning: the amount the food producer expects or recommends you to eat in one go. Or that a 'serving' as listed on the packaging constitutes a serving as per the official food circle (you may remember it as a food pyramid. Same same).

It turns out a serving is completely arbitrary and made up by the person trying to sell you the food. It has no relation to the official food circle. It's not even consistent within brands on the same product. Take yoghurt: one brand has exactly the same yoghurt for sale, and depending on the tub you buy a serving is 100 grams, or 150 grams, or 160 grams (the official food circle yoghurt serving size is 200 grams).

Another good example, take soft drink: the same product from the same brand comes in a serving of 250ml, 330ml, 375ml and 600ml (the official food circle soft drink serving size is 0ml). And if you think this might be a few bad apples (official food circle serving size: one medium apple), it's not. The same applies to tuna, tinned or diced fruit, chips, soup, muesli bars ... pretty much all products. There is no standard.

Which leads to the next problem: alcohol. I wanted to give an example of the consumer-manipulating air-speed velocity of alcohol serving sizes, only to discover alcohol doesn't even have to have a nutritional label! My health journey has been going on for years, and one thing I have discovered is I'm not going to stop drinking (sorry, Peter FitzSimons). Drink less and less often, sure. But teetotalling would be a bore.

However, I can definitely drink more efficiently, getting maximum taste and enjoyment for the least kilojoules. Or at least I'd like to, but there are no nutritional labels, so how can I tell which cider is less sugary? Or which beer is less carb-y? Go into any liquor store and you will find yourself in the Great Desert of Nutritional Information. I thought this was a bit strange, given literally every other non-medicinal liquid fit for human consumption is required to have a nutritional label. It's also the case that the alcohol industry has made political donations to both sides of politics at all levels for years. A coincidence, I'm sure.

The saviour of the nutritional labelling system was meant to be the Health Star Rating System. It is mostly what it sounds like: a star rating on the front of food packaging. More stars good, less stars bad. Compare food at a glance, much easier than reading many tiny nutritional labels! Well, no.

First of all, it's not compulsory. You can't compare food at a glance if only three out of 10 packages display health stars. Unsurprisingly, food companies usually pick and choose when to use health stars based on what is most profitable (which is why Milo removed health stars when it became apparent the real score was 1.5, not the 4.5 they had put on the package). Moreover, the system was going to be compulsory, but then in 2014 something suss seemed to happen in an assistant minister's office and it wasn't.

Second, health stars are determined within categories. So, for example, when determining the health star rating of cheese, that rating is in comparison to how healthy other cheeses are. It doesn't compare cheese with yoghurt, or cheese with muesli bars, or similar. Which means it's very hard to tell what foods are objectively "healthy", given junk food like sugary cereal and long-life juice get four or five stars, whereas many everyday foods like cheese get two or three stars (and in no surprise to anyone at this point, alcohol doesn't have health star ratings).

Frankly, I don't care whether I'm eating a cheese that's a bit more or less healthy than another cheese. I want to know that I'm choosing the healthiest food that meets my criteria - say, the healthiest kid car snack (muesli bar? Yoghurt? Rice crackers?) or the least unhealthy junk food for me (corn chips? Popcorn? Custard?). Surely it's not that complicated to dump the categories and compare all products against each other so that the health star ratings bear some resemblance to actual healthiness?

Altogether, this COVID-enabled journey about food labelling has been a bit disappointing. The fundamentals of a useful, health-inducing and consumer-friendly food labelling system already exist. The steps required to make the food labelling system fulfil its destiny are straightforward and well known. Why they haven't been taken is a mystery.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to eat my boredom with some healthy five-star foods.