Reading a label
An ingredients panel is written for a regulator, not for a shopper. These guides cover what to look for on one, diet by diet, and the other names each ingredient appears under.
- Vegan: the animal ingredients that hide on a labelMost animal ingredients on a packet do not read as animal ingredients. Some are numbers, some are chemical names, and a few are ordinary words that could mean either thing.
- Halal: the ingredients a label leaves unresolvedThe difficulty with halal is rarely the forbidden ingredient printed plainly. It is the long middle ground of ingredients whose source decides the answer, and which a label does not identify.
- Celiac and gluten: the ingredients that catch people outWheat must be declared in bold on any European label, so the obvious sources are easy. The difficulty is barley in things that do not taste of barley, and the long tail of ingredients whose name gives nothing away.
- Vegetarian: the animal ingredients that are easy to missMeat is never the problem. The problem is the cheese, the sweets, the beer and the sauces, where an animal ingredient did a job during manufacture and then stayed in the product.
- Buddhist vegetarian: what a label does not tell youBuddhist vegetarian practice asks something of a label that ordinary vegetarianism does not: it excludes the five pungent roots, and those are precisely the ingredients that hide inside the word seasoning.
- Jain: the ingredients a label will not flag for youA Jain diet excludes things no labelling rule anywhere is designed to highlight. Potato and onion are not allergens and not animal products, so nothing on a packet draws attention to them.
- Kosher: why the ingredients list cannot settle itKashrut turns on facts a packet does not carry: what an animal was, how it was slaughtered, and what else ran through the equipment beforehand. No ingredients list records any of that.
- Kidney diet: the phosphorus that is not in the nutrition tableThe nutrition panel on a packet does not list phosphorus. That is a serious gap for anyone with chronic kidney disease, because the most readily absorbed phosphorus in the food supply arrives as an additive.
- Milk allergy and lactose intolerance are not the same problemOne is a reaction to milk protein and one is difficulty digesting milk sugar. They are confused constantly, including on packaging, and the ingredients that matter are different for each.
- Peanut and tree nut allergy are two different thingsA peanut is a legume that grows underground, botanically closer to a pea than to an almond. Having one of these allergies says nothing certain about having the other, though a good many people have both.
- Soy allergy: the two questions worth separatingSoy is one of the declared allergens, so the obvious sources are labelled. The two questions that actually come up are whether the highly refined derivatives matter, and where soy protein arrives without the word soy.
- Fish allergy: where fish arrives without the word fishFish allergy and shellfish allergy are separate conditions involving different proteins, and having one implies nothing about the other. The difficulty with fish is how often it does the work of a seasoning rather than an ingredient.
- Shellfish allergy: two groups, declared separatelyShellfish is not one category. Crustaceans and molluscs are separate allergens under European labelling law, and many people react to one and not the other.
- Wheat allergy is not the same as celiac diseaseThree different conditions get treated as one thing, and the practical rules genuinely differ. The asymmetry that catches people is that gluten free is always wheat free, while wheat free is not always gluten free.