Consumers in Great Britain should be forgiven if they feel like they have been hit over the head by the food police with the government’s latest scheme to influence what Britons eat by encouraging the addition of the carbon footprint of food products on their labels.  Carbon labeling has hit the U.K.

On Friday a report aired by ABC’s World News with Charles Gibson focused on a company named Walkers that is now labeling all their potato chip bags with the carbon footprint of their product.  In the ABC report they showed that Walkers claimed that a regular bag of chips was responsible for 75 grams of CO2.  That sounds like a fairly large number when you realize that a typical one ounce bag of chips weighs 28 grams.  The U.K. bag may have been a bit larger but even so the ratio of CO2 emissions to the chips is alarmingly high.  The report compared the chips to a bottle of mango smoothie which though it has less fat than the chips is responsible for four times the CO2 output because the mangos have to be shipped from India to Great Britain.  Think about that the next time you try to eat healthy.

Now that the global warming alarmists have scared everyone about how much damage they are doing by just eating let’s look at the real effect of the chips versus smoothie problem.  It turns out that the chips generate .001% of the carbon an average person produces in a year so if you ate a bag of chips every day it would produce a whopping .37% of the average carbon output in one year.  Gadzooks!

As you may have guessed though the percentages won’t appear on the packages.  Yes the true measure of the impact will be obscured by larger scarier numbers with no context.

Hopefully most consumers will ignore the new labeling as they normally do anyway and that this idea will just fade away.

Now I think I will go out and buy some Doritos.

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