Basil Turner takes a look at food labelling and discovers that the percentages don’t really add up.
Silly me, I thought that 100% of anything meant all of it! It was in some consternation, then, that at breakfast the other day I read the following on the reverse of my pack of butter:
80% Blend Anchor Free Range Butter
(58%) blended with vegetable oil (33%)
This blend contains 47% milk fat
So, 58 + 33 = 91 — that’s 9% missing from that calculation. Where does the 80% come from? I have to assume also that the 47% is in the butter bit as I don’t think there’s any milk in vegetable oil.
We are what we eat — or so we are told. In pursuit of a healthy diet, we are further told to read the nutrition information on food packaging. I’ve done that, but either Anchor are guilty of sleight of hand or that they studied mathematics at the gobbledegook academy of statistical obfuscation. If their butter is an 80% blend, surely there must be 20% of something else! If, however, the product is 58% butter, the something else must be 42%.
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I’m pretty sure that the apparent nonsense of the figures is explainable, but as a simple member of ‘Joe Public’ I have to conclude that Anchor arithmetic is different from the sort I learnt at school. I admit that I wasn’t very good at sums but I insist that an 80% blend of butter suggests very strongly that 20% of the product is not butter — so there!
The only other thing I can think of is that the 58% is 58% of the 80%, which is the Free Range Butter content and that the other bit — sorry, that’s too complicated to work out — is another sort of butter. Help!
Currently, there are two main food labelling systems: the traffic light system, endorsed by the government and organisations such as the British Heart Foundation (BHF); and nutritional front-of-pack signposting, which outlines, as a percentage, guideline daily amounts (GDA), and is the method favoured by many food suppliers. But what works best? To find out more about how to read them, Click Here.
© Basil Turner 2008
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