The latest La Croix lawsuit had all of my friends on Facebook and LinkedIn share and communicate with their food science circles about how stupid the article was. For those not familiar with the claims, they found that naturally occurring lemon and lime compounds that can kill cockroaches implies it kills you too. The chemicals in question, limonine, linalool, and linalyl proprionate, are being tarred and feathered for extrapolating the fact that in high concentrations, they can kill insects. And in higher concentrations, can kill you!
When food babe talked about Azodicarbonamide (yoga mat material) in subway’s bread, her influence alone caused companies to remove it. The glycophosphate debate is still ranging on. Aspartame, caffeine, and coconut oil is still in debate on if it’s healthier for you, or can kill you.
But do we really want another trans fat or nicotine on our hands? What if these people are right? This is really hard to pinpoint as the things that make up your food won’t really instantly kill you. Even if they are the cause of death, could a doctor really autopsy you about how this chemical killed you? Could it also be the lotion you put on your skin, or the air you breathe, or the stress you got from work?
Fighting counterclaims with fear, or even facts is like spraying water on a fire. You think it’d work, but it’s an oil fire and it ends up burning the whole house down.
Let’s explore how we can fix this. But first, we need to be aware that this will keep on happening.
The Trend is Coming
On Alex Oesterle’s podcast, he interviewed Eric Pierce who gave a sort of forewarning on the future of flavors. I’ve mentioned this a few times, but very subtlely. This was about a year ago. In any case, consumers are going to ask what’s in the natural flavors that we use and we have to as food scientists communicate this very clearly. There is already a growing segment of consumers who won’t even eat things that are naturally flavored!
This presents a huge problem as the flavor industry is probably one of the most lucratively profitable segments in the food industry and pretty much dominate the world. These large corporations are going to have a huge problem communicating this to the masses.
Unfortunately, even as food scientists, it is very challenging to communicate what’s really in a natural flavor, how it’s processed, what it has. It took me about 2 years to figure out that glycerin is a carrier for most liquid flavors and people still have fear of using propalyene glycol. In fact, we had to tell our flavorhouses “we can’t use this, it’s banned in the EU” multiple times.
There will be a niche carved out of this. It’s a nugget of gold waiting to be exploited and there is probably nothing we can do about it. This is absolutely terrible, but as we’ve seen with gluten-free, Non-GMO, etc, this is the result of marketing for money, crushes pure science. Catering to emotions such as fear or happiness will always crush pure facts.
I wouldn’t be worried too much about this as most people don’t care. However, it is our job as food scientists to mitigate the spread of this trend because within this trend will be a lot of defamination through the flavors we work with. As what’s happened with Chobani, it’s a double edge sword, but it’s a very sharp double-edged sword.
It is inevitable that there will be something niched out. After all, there are people who believe vaccines can kill you and the earth is flat. When you find someone irrational like that, just remind yourself that this is a small population who probably won’t be convinced by how many facts you yell at them.
It’s A Lawyer’s Job to Find Lawsuits
Can you believe that there are people in the world that spend all their time looking at food labels and calling them out, and then filing a lawsuit?
Though this has many good intentions, as we all know, there are people who abuse this power. There has been a history of lawyers and food bloggers who call out things on food and then it explodes in a sea of fire.
But A Lawyer is Not A Food Scientist
With the amount of schooling it takes to be a lawyer, there is probably no reason that a lawyer would study food science, well, until they start finding ways to tell people coffee can kill you.
A lawyer’s ego is a very powerful thing to break and they are masters of manipulation. Uncreatively nameless firms like Beaumont Costales (the dudes suiting La Croix) take great pride in cases like these and why not? The law suit brought them mountains of press. Perhaps in their mind, they are doing justice.
What I’m trying to get at is that this will not stop. Lawyers will keep on doing this whether they are right or wrong. What can we do as food scientists to educate this? This is very hard to do, but perhaps the best way is to teach people the basics of sense. If you took flavor 101, or had a flavor house come and teach you about flavors, smelling a flavor and talking about the compounds was the basis of the class. When you associate your senses with learning, you create a memory which can be used to think “ok, that’s fine”.
For example, when you smell a lemon and have someone explain the intricacies of how linalool reacts with your taste and smell, that gives a positive experience.
As opposed to yelling on twitter, which not only strips away all emotional context but since sight is the only connection factor, doesn’t give a great context.
Someone actually could make a lot of money just teaching lawyers what’s in their food…
Who’s fault is it?
Is it La Croix fault? Or the flavor house they use?
Maybe it’s the FDA’s fault for not fixing what natural really means.
Is it the food science industry’s fault for being really crappy on communication?
Just like when California says coffee can cause cancer, I highly doubt coffee sales went down. For La Croix, in most cases, sales will dip, but it might just be a blip on the radar. Perhaps the people who will stop buying La Croix is maybe only 100 people who are just really loud on Facebook. La Croix is an extremely powerful brand and there are so many loyal followers who will do their research. The chances that people will stay away from La Croix because of this is just very low.
In most situations, the chaos this has caused is already being called out. From what I see, there are more articles saying how ridiculous it is rather than it isn’t. A simple google search from any of the chemicals that the law firm listed shows that the compounds are naturally occurring.
Perhaps all that’s needed is valuable content on the internet that can give people context rather than yelling the facts. The ability to give the choice for someone to google it is now an option to convince people that these chemicals are safe.
Perhaps you can write that article.
