It has never been particularly clear what I ought to have been watching out for when I look at food labels. For a while now I've been wondering if I could try to design a better solution, just for fun really. Specifically, I wanted to improve the label's readability and potential for consumers to grasp the basic information to make more informed choices in the store. Additionally—and, out of a particular vengeance for intentional obfuscation on the part of greedy corporations—I wanted to put pressure on issues of production relevant to the current cultural and economic values like environmental impact and ethical consumption.
In my subsequent exploration, including parsing through all 132 pages of the official FDA labeling guidelines (which is formatted in a strange Q&A-type format), I iterated on many prototypes until I found something adaptable and concise. I found that paying attention to contrast and hierarchy was the most important in allowing it to be so modular. I'll explain what I landed on here in a sec, but first, it's important to note why I made the decision to iterate upon the existing label framework instead of making something entirely new. For one, it is already familiar to both manufacturers and consumers. Building on top of this instead of scrapping it for something like food classifications is both backed by science and doesn't require total re-education to understand. It is simply not realistic to expect consumers to learn about the multitudes of classifications, including the chemical origin and makeup, the significance of a nutrient's mass, its function in the body, or the difference between monosaccharide glucose and disaccharide sucrose. The existing partition of nutrient facts we use today is quite satisfactory to our dietary and nutritional needs. Specific claims already have to be disclosed on the Nutrition Panel as per FDA guidelines and can be improved.
Projects of passion often yield the most growth in my experience and this project was no different. I taught myself some basic After Effects and improved upon my first Milk of Human Kindness work—all of which I am very happy with. And while it is a hard sell, given its scope, that doesn't negate the value of doing experiments like these. A lot of the parts surrounding the required icons will need additional support to be able to investigate claims and perhaps enforce changes. There's plenty of funding though—most of it just gets funneled into arms manufacturing and maintaining the country's imperial army...
While I personally would not trust our governing body to actually do something meaningful like this, it nevertheless serves as an excellent exercise on accessible design and–more importantly–in thinking about and engaging with different ways to improve our communities.
1. Calories are a pretty decent metric of importance, but it doesn't tell enough of the story concerning how food interacts with our bodies. The proliferation of diabetes in America shows we need to be paying more attention to the effect food has on our health. Foods high in refined carbs and sugar are digested more quickly and often highly impact blood sugar levels, while foods high in protein, fat, or fiber typically have a low impact. We use the measure of this impact to calculate a specific food's Glycemic Index. Glycemic Load simply factors in the number of carbs in a serving to determine how it affects blood sugar levels (GL = GI * carbs / 100).
2. The ingredients list remains largely the same, though the safety evaluation of any included chemical or substance must be disclosed. Currently, as found on fda.gov, "any substance that is intentionally added to food is a food additive, [which] is subject to premarket review and approval by FDA unless the substance is generally regarded as safe under conditions of its intended use..." I found that it is very easy to overcrowd the ingredients list by trying to explain the roles different chemicals and substances have in any given product. Nutrition Label guidelines already state that some ingredients necessitate descriptive language to indicate what it is used for, though this could certainly be improved in the future. More important ingredient warnings like artificial colorings ought to be handled by the federal government in this case, similar to how European countries have outright banned certain ingredients from being used.
3. By far, the biggest change involves a panel of reliable claims in the form of standardized iconography. There are two sections; the main section includes three persistent icons, whose relative contrast serves as boolean operants of disclosure. Basically, if the condition applies to any particular item, the icon is fully shaded and must have a WCAG color contrast ratio greater than or equal to 10:1, though 21:1 is obviously preferred. A negative declaration means the icon is still present, but its contrast is greatly reduced to discern the difference, and to convey it does not apply to that specific item. The goal of these required disclosures, aside from the primary objective to improve readability, even at a glance, is to accommodate the growing and just culture of accountability and agency in consumption. This was challenging to define, but I'll describe the three values here:
4. The section below the required icons are voluntary disclosure claims. "Voluntary" is a bit misleading, for there are a lot of over-arching rules and exceptions requiring disclosure of what is used in products, but it is the verbiage that the FDA uses in their guidelines. Ultimately, this section mainly represents allergy and dietary/religious restriction warnings. Crucially though, these icons need only appear in an affirmative state. If it doesn't apply to the product, no disclosure is necessary.
An Open Source Project
