In the last few decades there has been a turn in politics to “informational regulation”, the indirect regulation of products and safety through the use of information disclosures. One prominent example of this can be seen in the explosion of informative labels on foods in supermarkets, and the use of information about food to inform consumers of potential risks or to “nudge” them towards “correct” choices without directly regulating the product contents. Increasingly, a wide variety of actors —political and regulatory institutions, social movements, and corporations— see labels as a key tool for framing the “choice architecture” of food consumers’ purchases, thereby implementing public policy through a private markets. This paper examines the roots of this informational turn in food politics, and situates it within a growing literature in STS on the emergence of “market-embedded ethics,” or what one scholar has colorfully called “the Age of Responsibilization” (Shamir, 2008).

To illustrate this turn, I will describe two key moments in the history of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's regulation of nutrition labeling: the 1973 introduction of the "voluntary" Nutrition Information label, and the 1993 introduction of the mandatory Nutrition Facts panel. In 1973, the U.S. FDA shifted its food label regulations from “standards of identity” to informative labeling through three new agency rules: the introduction of a voluntary “Nutrition Information” label, the end of the use of “imitation” labeling, and the requirement of listing ingredients for all foods, not just nonstandard ones. I will show how this first turn to labeling arose in a climate of anti-government sentiment and early deregulation, where cross-party confidence in “letting consumers decide for themselves” led to a governmentality of persuasive tactics (information labels) rather than coercive ones (food prohibitions).

I then discuss the fallout of this reliance on information labels in subsequent decades, examining how it constrained the terms of later debates, particularly those in the early 1990s with the introduction of the “Nutrition Facts” panel. I explain how the FDA envisioned the Nutrition Facts panel to be a kind of back-panel virtual “obligatory passage point” for all front-panel health claims or advertisements. It thereby sought to construct a legal infrastructure for food information that situated the agency as a principal enforcer and standardizer of diet information, without directly standardizing or prohibiting unhealthy foods themselves. Yet even this indirect form of regulation would be contested, and in the paper I describe how opponents of the FDA’s new label mobilized around a notion of “commercial free speech,” reframing food choice as not just choice about what’s in the marketplace, but also who gets to decide what sources of information are valid and “sound science”.

Throughout the talk I foreground the way informative labeling and other types of “read the label” consumer advocacy presuppose a certain kind of engaged, rational, and literate citizen-as-consumer, which this project seeks to unpack. I argue that, rather than view the introduction of nutrition labeling as a narrative of consumer liberation through information, we should examine labels as a regulatory apparatus whose purpose, perhaps more than to address the consumer audiences that they ostensibly target, is to shape industry practices and construct markets.