All on a single bag of popcorn?

I wasn't going to get into company logos, but we are surrounded by logos that supposedly represent marketing concepts or categories, or organizations meant to certify ingredients.  Here is a whole family of these symbols from one single bag of popcorn:



The first batch has:

- a passable symbol for whole grain, 

- a really dull "V" that supposedly represents the concept of "vegan", 

- a decent image for "cholesterol free" which appears to be showing a plaque buildup in an artery and saying "no, let's not do that"

- U in a circle means "Kosher" for some reason.  There's a long an interesting history here, check out Understanding Kosher Symbols for more.

- "NON GMO" could not come up with any visual symbol for their concept

- GF in a circle means certified gluten-free, I suppose.  Yawn.

The symbol for "0g trans fat" is unusually accurate for a chemical being shown to the masses: trans fats do have the hydroxyl groups or side chains pointing in opposite directions.  If they were on the same side they would be cis- isomers.

The next batch has a logo for the Whole Grains Council, a sheaf of wheat with "100%", which is clear enough.  Then we have the GF and U circles repeated and an actual logo and website for the NON-GMO project, a step up from the bland non-logo repeated in the first group.

The last group is a winner and a loser. I was skeptical of the "Smart Label" concept -- big deal, you scan the code and see the ingredients that are already on the package.  In fact, it goes much deeper, even showing sustainability and waster reduction plans for the parent company Conagra.  So, kudos to them for pulling together a big set of data and meta data about the product and companies involved.  

The loser is the recycling logo.  The whole freaking history of attempts to recycle plastics, acting like it's simple, when all it ever did was get millions of tons of differently-numbered plastics lumped into bins around the world.  It is NOT simple, and this logo here says "multi-layer bag" and appears to be crossing out the classic recycle symbol as if saying "don't even try to figure this one out, people."  Sure, you can go to How2Recycle.info and get this message "How2Recycle is a standardized labeling system that clearly communicates recycling instructions to the public."  Does this symbol saying "Multi Layer Bag" in ANY way communicate instructions?  I will keep my eye out for this symbol on other products and see if they do have usable info on anything.  Maybe this first one (this popcorn bag) was just unrecyclable garbage after all.




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