Athenae, Food and Drink

Just Call It Something Else!

Corn sugar:

The group plans to apply Tuesday to the Food and Drug Administration
to get “corn sugar” approved as an alternative name for food labels.

Approval
could take two years, but that’s not stopping the industry from using
the term now in advertising. There’s a new online marketing campaign at
http://www.cornsugar.com
and on television. Two new commercials try to alleviate shopper
confusion, showing people who say they now understand that “whether
it’s corn sugar or cane sugar, your body can’t tell the difference.
Sugar is sugar.”

Renaming products has succeeded before. For example, low eurcic acid rapeseed oil became much more popular after becoming “canolaoil” in 1988. Prunes tried to shed a stodgy image by becoming “dried plums” in 2000.

The new name would help people understand the sweetener, said Audrae Erickson, president of the Washington-based group.

“It has been highly disparaged and highly misunderstood,” she said. She declined to say how much the campaign costs.

A.

8 thoughts on “Just Call It Something Else!”

  1. Or, call it crap. Not that I drink much soda these days, but the difference in taste between real sugar and corn syrup is easy to distinguish.
    Whether corn syrup actually leads to increased consumption is something for scientists to determine, but what is true is that you can find the stuff in all sorts of food you wouldn’t think would have it…your tax dollars/agricultural policy at work.

  2. I’m shocked that they are considering this. For years, manufacturers have hidden behind High Fructose Corn Syrup as a way of hiding the sugar (According to current food labeling, a whole list of sugars aren’t considered sugar in food including fructose as well as a whole lot of other sugars whose names end in -ose.) As a diabetic, I take the duplicity rather personally. Not to mention, if you are allergic to corn, you have to avoid almost all foods.
    Another dodge is to use fruit juice concentrates and say “no sugar added.” (Used a lot in jams/jellies).
    A documentary I saw made the point that almost all of our food comes from corn. We have corn-fed beef, high fructose corn syrup, etc.
    And why do we subsidize the production and use of corn syrup when there seems to be an association with diabetes??????????????????

  3. Then I’ll just be avoiding all products containing “corn sugar”. Frak the bastids.

  4. I’m ready for the Democratic Party to join this trend. After the past 2 years I think good marketing requires that it be called something else, but I’m stumped about what to call it. Obviously, the names I would choose wouldn’t work for non X-rated publications.

  6. “It has been highly disparaged and highly misunderstood
    give me a fucking break. It’s poison, corn lobby lady.

  7. Yeah, we have the science sayingsugar is sugar, idiots. Sucrose (table sugar) is a molecule of glucose stuck to a molecule of fructose (oops, there’s fructose again). I don’t like the taste of corn syrup because it tastes like corn, but I’m not under any illusion that it’s somehow different from sucrose. The only sugar that troubles me is that nasty one made of glucose + galactose.

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