Know what’s inside? According to Thilo Bode, quality seals are often an illusion of transparency.
Image: Oliver Schwarzwald
The price of food is not a sign of quality, says Foodwatch founder Thilo Bode. The same applies to information on the contents of packaging – some things in product tests would have “blown him away”.
Mr. Bode, my shopping basket usually looks like this: products that are as unprocessed as possible, regional as possible, lots of plant-based products, organic if possible. So far I thought that I was shopping relatively healthy with it. What do you mean?
There is a considerable lack of transparency with all these foods. You can hardly or not at all judge the quality. Be it with vegetables, where we do not know under what conditions they were grown; then the vegan foods, which are often highly processed and sometimes have problematic additives. Organic has clear advantages: no mineral fertilizers, no use of pesticides. But organic food can be highly unorganic. The production of an organic beef steak may emit more greenhouse gases than a conventional one, and the labeling of processed organic food is just as opaque as that of non-organic. There is little or no way to avoid the non-information and misinformation.