Extra Credit

Why do food products come mislabeled? For the longest time, I’ve wanted to know why a bag of popcorn said Gluten Free, when popcorn is simply made of corn and could not contain gluten. When I was in high school, I had a friend who couldn’t eat gluten. We were in the same advisory group and our group would get together once a week. We would always bring a snack, but because he was in our group, there would always be some sort of gluten free snack in the bunch. There was the occasional pretzel, which was always marked gluten free, but there was also the potato chips. They were also marketed as gluten free. I didn’t know why, because if you made them correctly, there should only be potatoes, salt, and some sort of oil in the chip. Maybe it was a sort of branding to get the gluten free people to buy it, but I always found it odd. I find that with many corn-based food products, they typically will say gluten free on the packaging. I don’t know if it’s unnecessary in this case, because if you are allergic, you’d want to know. I am allergic to certain food colors and I always like to know if it is dye free. So when something says dye free, I know I’m okay.

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