The proposed new food labels from the US federal government are an insult to our intelligence. These labels are designed to 'simplify' the interpretation of a food's quality by using a color-coded scoring system that ranks a food's 'quality' on the basis of three parameters: "nutrition", "foodness" and "welfare". Each parameter will assigned a value from 0 to 5 (from worst to 'best'). The sum of the parameter scores will "help" people judge a food's "quality at a glance". Let's look at each parameter:

This parameter is supposed to represent how nutritious or healthy a food is. A score of zero is supposed to represent a very unhealthy food while 5 is extremely healthy. How exactly the government intends to judge healthiness remains to be seen.

No, it's not a word... yet. But foodness represents how 'natural' or unprocessed a food is. Why this is supposed to matter, the government doesn't say.

This parameter is designed to help us judge how good or bad is the production of the food for people, animals, the environment, the 'carbon footprint' and perhaps more.