August 25, 2008
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Well! I am appalled. Deceptive marketing, that's what it is.
Don and I are watching FoodTV's "Unwrapped", which shows how various food items are made.
One segment just completed was about those itty-bitty "baby" carrots so popular now. Notice the quotation marks. They are there for a reason.
Turns out those are actually ordinary, full-grown carrots cut down and polished! Nothing "baby" about them.
I think that's flat-out dishonest.
Comments (10)
I just recently discovered that, too. You gotta be on your guard every minute, I tell ya! :steamed:
That's why they run specials on 'em so cheap. Besides, they're all the same shape! Did you really think they grow 'em that way?
My dad warned us all long ago about that particular deception. Did you know the same thing applies to sea scallops? If they appear perfectly round, instead of more "organically" shaped, then they're some kind of cheap whitefish cut to look like scallops. The spelling on the package will likely be a bit different, just to keep it legal.
Just who can you trust?
me<><
They're not really all the same shape. Some are more pointy and they're varying sizes, after all.
So, yeah, dumb ol' Anne figured that they were, indeed, "baby" carrots, harvested earlier than those in the big ol' bunches. Prettied up so as to be edible right out of the bag, mind, but certainly young carrots.
Why on earth doesn't this qualify as deceptive marketing? I don't see why it wouldn't.
Sure it's deceptive, but if there's no legal definition for the word "baby" as applied to vegetables, there's no real way to stop it, I guess. Being subjectively "deceptive" per se is not against the law -- you actually have to violate an accepted phrase with a fixed meaning to be guilty of something illegal. In the more subjective, unregulated sense of "we're trying to give someone a certain impression by our choice of words without saying something definitively false", a whole lot of advertising and labeling is "deceptive." The reason "baby" isn't definitively false is that "baby" is not a word that is really accurately applied to any vegetables -- it's a colloquialism. So it's hard to sanction somebody for violating a colloquialism.
Not saying it isn't deceptive, because we all know what they're trying to make us think, but you seem to be implying that if it's deceptive, it can be stopped or punished, and I don't think that's true in this case.
ISTM a colloquialism that is commonly understood in the same way by the overwhelming majority of the populace tacitly works as a legal definition.
Vegetable or not, I cannot think of any use of "baby" - barring the "hubba hubba!" variation - that is intended to signify anything other than Very Very Young.
Those carrots ain't Very Very Young.
Bet if it were taken to court, the carrot people would lose.
I don't think it does work, not the for the purposes of regulation. It's like "organic" -- everyone knows what it means, or what we think it means, but there's no actual regulatory definition, so it's extremely hard to regulate the "organic" label on food.
This is the pitfall of over-regulation -- when you have a specific regulation for everything, then anything that isn't specifically covered in the regulations, can't be controlled.
And besides, the carrots are very, very young -- can you imagine having a carrot more than a year old in a store in any form? Don't we call a lot of things under a year old "babies?"
See, that's the problem -- it's all subjective and relative, not enforceable.
Except Hannah-the-Roo pointed out on my Facebook page that there exists such critters as "baby corn", and that actually is underage corn.
That's a precedent, that is.
Sure it's a precedent, and there are also "baby" fresh vegetables you can buy that are really small, etc. -- but does it create anything binding? Just because Joe calls immature corn baby corn, does that mean that everything Mary calls "baby" has to be relatively immature? And how do you judge whether something is "relatively" immature enough to be called "baby," without an official standard?
So again, I'm not saying the carrot packagers aren't trying to pull a fast one, just that if there's no actual standard for what "baby" is, I can't see how they could restrict someone from using the word. Maybe you need to lobby the FDA or the USDA or whoever it would be, to create a standard for the word "baby" as applied to vegetables.
Actually there has been a legal definition of "organic" since 2002. And naturally, whenever the government gets involved in anything you run into problems -- there are companies that know how get through the legal loopholes while still not raising their food in a way that the old-fashioned organic farmers would have recognized (sustainability, diversity, etc.), so it turns into a way of getting factory-farmed foods labeled "organic." And then since it's legally sanctioned by the US government, there's a perception by the consumer that it's everything you'd expect in an organic food, when it very well might not be. Amongst small farmers, "organic" has taken on such a bad reputation that people who were glad to use it before have starting dropping it in favor of other words or phrases.
ISTM that the more impersonal our communitites get, the more we have to have tight regulations. I don't think a cop can arrest someone on charges of "reckless driving" anymore -- how do you define that? When the judge doesn't personally know the character of the policeman and the accused, it's just one man's word against another unless there's some technical violation of an actual law that was being committed. For all he knows, the policeman may have something personal against the driver and pulled him over for some tiny deviation from perfect driving, or the driver may be the kind that really is reckless and never accepts responsibility so will deny the charges. This is why we're starting to see laws against cell phone usage by drivers.
It is a pickle, and I don't see any way out of it, given current circumstances.
I've know that for years about carrots. Sometimes they're called "short cut" carrots - as in "these have been cut short.
And we do use "baby" to mean generally small. When you take "baby steps" are you taking very young steps?
And the H3 has been called a "baby Hummer". So "baby carrots" can reasonably be taken to mean "small carrots."
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