'Reference intake'? Say that in English, please

For some 10 years, all discussions in the UK have referred to GDAs and we all thought we knew what GDA meant. Now the EC is saying the word 'guideline' implies nutritional advice to consume the amount declared, but RI does not.

It ought to recognise that consumers are neither lawyers nor philologists (experts on the science of meaning) and because the dialogue surrounding the term GDA in the UK has given it the meaning that we all understand in the context, what right has the EC to suddenly say we have to call a GDA an RI which, to us, stands for Royal Institution or Rhode Island?

Alien terms ​

This is not the only time the EC has dictated that alien terms must be used on UK food packaging. A great example is the requirement for kilojoules as well as calories to be given in nutritional information, despite the fact that the former is superfluous in the UK because no-one uses it. Ironic, because Mr Joule was an English physicist and the calorie was first defined by Nicolas Clément a Frenchman.

The meaning of the word 'bio' is another one we lost to the rest of the EU because, in many Member States, it means 'organic'. That meaning was never ascribed to 'bio' in UK English, so consumers would never have been confused. However, that fact counted for nought and the term was outlawed in the UK for organic food.

English speakers ​

On metrication, we won the right to continue using the mile and to allow greengrocers to sell goods by the pound as well as the kilo because consumers wanted that. So we should be allowed to label food using terms that are intelligible to English speakers.

With health claims, adapted wording is permitted where it has the same meaning as the authorised wording to consumers.

That sounds like good news until it is realised that the 'flexibility' is between, rather than within, the languages. For example, the English version of the claims regulation uses the word 'normal' for certain claims where in other languages the words for 'healthy' or 'proper' are the nearest equivalents. However, in English claims, the word 'healthy' would not be allowed in place of 'normal', even if it might be more appropriate in certain contexts. Here, native English speakers are penalised for having more than one word with the same or similar meanings depending on the context.