HR 4167 Passed in the House
Last week, I wrote about HR 4167, which would impose a single, national label and forbid states or local municipalities from adding label requirements to food products.
The bill has passed through the House and has moved to the Senate, though our publisher Kate suggests it’s unlikely to move in this session.
When I posted about my opposition to this bill on An Obsession with Food, I received a few good comments from readers.
One, Mark, wrote the following:
if a municipality, a tiny one, decides that all foods must have label X, then a national company has two choices: 1) relabel ALL their products, regardless of where they sell them, so that they comply with the new tiny muni’s law or 2) just don’t sell in that municipality
Robyn uses her own experience as an argument:
Not only are there hard dollar costs of reprinting labels, researching the nutrition information etc. But there are also soft dollar costs in training seminars and personnel training efforts. Each cost then needs to be recaptured by increasing prices to customers who then pass it on to consumers.
While I still oppose the bill, these comments illustrate that it’s not a black and white issue.
