National "healthy" foods and the junk food culture

<p>As I reported <a href="http://foodlawprof.typepad.com/food_and_nutrition_law_an/2006/12/food_babel_cspi.html">yesterday</a>, the Center for Science in the Public Interest wants the FDA to develop national &quot;healthy&quot; labels. The plea is a response to the plethora of food company labels and symbols on supermarket shelves, and the rationale is that &quot;a prominent and reliable symbol on the fronts of packages would be a tremendous help to those harried shoppers racing through the supermarket.&quot;</p> <p>This makes sense, but I think it misses the bigger picture.&nbsp; Rather than speeding up the Harried-Shopper Race with easy-to-recognize quick-to-grab preprocessed packaged foods, perhaps we should try to eliminate the Harried Shopper Race altogether.&nbsp; What if people actually had time to cook their own foods?&nbsp; (See my<a href="http://foodlawprof.typepad.com/food_and_nutrition_law_an/2006/12/government_shou.html"> post</a> today about British Tory leader David Cameron's comments.) There would be no need to race down the long aisles of prepackaged foods.&nbsp; But this would require a change in culture rather than more rules that seem to be consumer-oriented, but actually function to perpetuate an unhealthy lifestyle and by facilitating the marketing of processed foods.</p>