Food marketers have latched onto the idea that having only a few ingredients will make their products appealing to consumers “Marketers such as Starbucks discover that simple sells,” USA Today, October 28, 2009). This is as bad as using readability formulas to judge whether a document is understandable.

What consumers really crave is a short list of familiar, wholesome ingredients. We respond to the idea of just five ingredients because we assume that those five won’t be dehydrated potato flakes, monosodium glutamate, whey solids, artificial coloring and artificial flavoring.

A shorter list may be quicker to read and therefore more transparent, but transparency itself is not the goal—we need to focus on what is revealed behind the curtain. To know all is definitely not to forgive all.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 2:54 pm and is filed under plain English, simplicity, simplification. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.