Clodfobble |
12-17-2015 09:53 AM |
We have laws similar to the one above as well. But we also have a law stating that "incidental" or "trace amounts" (which the FDA specifically chooses not to define) that "have no functional or technical effect" in the finished product don't have to be declared. So legal precedent is really all you have to go on. Historically, if it's over 2%, it's pretty automatically assumed to be important just based on volume. And if it's under 2%, and you add it yourself, it's usually (though not in every case that's been challenged) assumed to be important, because you went to the trouble of adding it. The kicker is when it's an ingredient-of-an-ingredient, they almost always get away with asserting that it wasn't important. So if you add "apple juice from concentrate," and your concentrate supplier added 1.9% corn syrup, it's not an important ingredient to you because you in theory could have used a concentrate that didn't use that syrup and you wouldn't care (except of course you do care, otherwise you would have used a concentrate that didn't add the syrup, but you didn't because it would be less tasty and more expensive.)
So then you get companies creating shell companies, so they can be the concentrate supplier that adds the corn syrup, and then sell the concentrate to themselves and not have to declare the corn syrup because the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.
Or even more often, that shit comes from Argentina or another country where the regulations are a joke, and everyone fucking knows there's corn syrup in it, but the Argentinian company promises cross-their-heart that it doesn't, so the American company gets to claim it doesn't.
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