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2001-04-07
Someone has to be awfully stupid not to be able to
figure out that 'fibres de coco' means fibres of
cocoa.
My belief is that the TABD has a hard-on against
metric. During their campaign they never brought up the languages
issue. Labelling in different languages doesn't seem to be a
problem. It is obvious from their drive to keep supplementary labels is a
"soft" attempt to expose the world market to FFU and eventually replace metric
with FFU.
They know FFU is both confusing and deceiving and
they feel using FFU will make the consumer less able to see fraud. Plus
the American members even though they may be educated are metric illiterate and
feel comfortable with FFU. If they use SI, they do so reluctantly because
the world is SI, but they would rather use FFU.
Plus it is one thing to some countries to
metricate, but it is another thing to completely destroy FFU. And they
will fight any attempts to rid the earth of FFU. You will see these companies
make no effort to comply with the EU directive in 2009. They will every
effort to see that FFU never vanishes from the face of the earth.
So far they have made no attempts to get the FPLA
amended and most likely will fight any efforts to do so.
John
Keiner ist hoffnungsloser versklavt als derjenige, der irrt�mlich glaubt
frei zu sein.
There are none more hopelessly enslaved then those who falsely believe they
are free!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, 2001-04-07 12:09
Subject: [USMA:12075] RE: Metric and
Recessions
In a message dated
2001-04-06 19:18:57 Eastern Daylight Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Canadian regulations require all prepackaged food to give equal
prominence
to French and English on the labels. That is a much
more expensive
requirement than labelling in two measurement systems.
TABU never mentions
that requirement, and for that reason I think
I think that their protests
are bogus. The European market also
has many linquistic requirements that
preclude the use of American
labels.
Joseph B. Reid
17 Glebe Road West
Toronto
M5P 1C8
Tel.
416 486-6071
And everything I buy nowadays in the
Washington, D.C. area seems to be in
both English and French, with both
equally featured. In some cases there is
also Spanish, but French is
much more common. So whining about putting
metric quantity
indicators on packaging for export to Europe is completely
hypocritical.
In a related matter, the latest edition of Consumer Reports (May 2001;
a
magazine that ignores metric), the last page, called "Selling It" (a
feature
of misleading advertising) shows an ad for a doormat. The
heading is "Fancy
Fibers -- Funny, we never thought of coconut as a
particularly elegant fiber,
but as 'fibres de coco,' it does have a
certain cachet." What was it really?
Simply the French
translation of the English content declaration. (The
entire label
shown was bilingual.) Dodos. Not only clueless about metric
but clueless about bilingual labeling. Unfortunately you can't
e-mail them
unless you subscribe ($) to their on-line services, but I can
write them a
letter, and will.
Carleton
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