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Showing posts from September, 2025

The literature of labels: an irregular series …

Everything is -'friendly'. Eco-friendly. User-friendly. Reader-friendly.  Objects, concepts. What happened to human-friendly?  Vegan-friendly , trumpeted the package, which contained wheat germ. Long-term readers might or might not recall that I have had something of an ongoing  semi- obsession with the over-earnest, ungrammatical, or sheer moronic label claims that plague manufactured food products. Clearly, either the general population - the consumers of these goods and their verbal assaults - or the marketing industry - their illiterate authors - has become stupider. Or both. Probably both. Irony aside, what madness is it that the consumer needs a printed assurance that a bag containing 100% ex-vegetation has no animal content? Or that its processing has not knowingly been associated with members of the animal kingdom throughout its journey from grassland to four-colour-process-overprinted crude oil-based plastic packaging? Which, in any case, means what? A process w...