Why do U.S. policymakers so often reach for a food label rather than a rule? In this Food Thinkers webinar, Dr Xaq Frohlich will draw from his recent book From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age (UC Press, 2023), to provide a critical history of what he calls the "informational turn" in US food policy. This phrase describes the decades-long shift toward consumer labels, rather than mandatory standards, as the primary tool for governing food markets. Beginning with the FDA's turn to nutrition labeling in the 1970s, Dr Frohlich will trace how a logic of consumer "empowerment" became a substitute for harder regulatory intervention, serving corporate interests as much as public ones. 

Through landmark debates, over GMO labeling, USDA "organic" certification, and the recent "bioengineered" foods label, Frohlich will show how informational governance unloads responsibility onto individual consumers, forecloses structural solutions, and can function as a technology of obfuscation rather than transparency. The FDA's Nutrition Facts panel, widely celebrated as a model of hands-off public governance, illustrates the same dynamic: a market device that naturalizes food risk as a matter of individual choice, not systemic design.