Spin versus fair speak in food labelling: A matter of taste?

Food Quality and Preference 21 (2010) 1016–1025

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Spin versus fair speak in food labelling: A matter of taste? Viktor Smith a,d,*, Peter Møgelvang-Hansen b,d, Grethe Hyldig c,d a

Center for Language, Cognition and Mentality, Copenhagen Business School, Dalgas Have 15, DK-2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark Department of Law, Copenhagen Business School, Howitzvej 13, DK-2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark c DTU Aqua, DTU Food, Department of Seafood Research, The Technical University of Denmark, Søltofts Plads, Building 221, DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark d FairSpeak Project, Copenhagen Business School, Dalgas Have 15, DK-2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark b

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 30 August 2009 Received in revised form 18 May 2010 Accepted 19 May 2010 Available online 24 May 2010 Keywords: Food labelling Fairness Misleading commercial practices Food naming Semiotics Food concept analysis

a b s t r a c t The article sheds new light on sensory elements in legal cases concerning misleading food labelling. It presents the findings of a qualitative review of 821 cases on misleading food labelling registered in 2002–2007 by the Danish food authorities. The cases show that sensory tends to be backgrounded by other arguments more easily verbalized. A taxonomy of the sensory dimensions of the cases is set up and different sensory aspects are analyzed in order to establish to what the extent and how sensory variables can be integrated into experimental setups for testing the misleading potential of food naming and labelling solutions with a view to promoting ‘‘fair speak” principles for in-store food-to-consumer communication. The study is part of the cross-disciplinary research project ‘‘Spin or fair speak – when foods talk” which aims at providing new knowledge, tools, and experimental evidence for self-regulation, public control, and innovation in food naming and labelling. Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction This article takes a new approach to the role of sensory factors in consumers’ food choice, and, in particular, their possible dissatisfaction with choices made and/or the cues available for making them by words, texts, figures, illustrations, and other labelling elements on the packaging, or, indeed, by the physical product itself. The bulk of consumer-oriented sensory research is concerned with consumers’ liking and preferences as a basis for developing sensorically attractive products which consumers are likely to buy (Grunert, 2005, 2007; Jaeger & MacFie, 2000; MacFie, 2007; Poulsen, Juhl, Kristensen, Bech, & Engelund, 1996; Shepherd & Raats, 2006). Yet if we assume that ‘‘sensory properties are the most powerful influence on [food] choice, in most situations” (Rozin, 2007, p. 17), and these situations include in-store decision-making and consumers’ ex-post evaluation of decisions made, it seems reasonable to expect that sensory factors would also be of great importance when consumers feel disappointed or, ultimately, misled by a product and/or its immediate presentation. Paradoxically, a qualitative review of 821 Danish administrative cases on misleading food naming and labelling (Smith et al., 2009) does not immediately seem to support this intuition. When putting their dissatisfaction into words, consumers and consumer organizations tend to base their case on ‘‘hard” factual information such

* Corresponding author. at: Center for Language, Cognition and Mentality, Copenhagen Business School, Dalgas Have 15, DK-2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark. Tel.: +45 3815 3267; mobile: +45 6146 5394. E-mail address: [email protected] (V. Smith). 0950-3293/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.foodqual.2010.05.016

as origin, ingredients, method of preparation, etc. Less than 7% of the cases overtly involve sensory properties of the food products in question, i.e. their taste, smell, texture, visual appearance, etc., if judging from the criteria further described in Section 2. At first sight, this could be taken to suggest that sensory elements play a less important role than could be expected when consumers feel misled by the immediate presentation of a food product. However, a possible alternative explanation could be that consumers and consumer organization choose to rely on ‘‘harder” product facts simply because they are easier to verbalize than sensory ones for cognitive reasons discussed below. This consideration seems particularly relevant in the context of legal decision-making in that legal rules (in casu: on misleading presentation of food products)1 1 In Denmark, the primary provision is found in Regulation (EC) No. 178/2002 laying down the general principles and requirements of food law, etc., article 16: ‘‘Without prejudice to more specific provisions of food law, the labelling, advertising and presentation of food or feed, including their shape, appearance or packaging, the packaging materials used, the manner in which they are arranged and the setting in which they are displayed, and the information which is made available about them through whatever medium, shall not mislead consumers.” This principle calls for interpretation specifying inter alia the test for deciding in individual cases whether consumers are misled. To this end, the European Court of Justice and the EU-legislation have developed the notion of ‘‘the average consumer” (see e.g. Incardona & Poncibò, 2007 for details). More specific rules regulate the presentation of some specific categories of food products mainly by regulating product names, and defining products and characteristics, e.g. the Danish administrative regulation 878/2003 implementing Council Directive 2001/112/EC relating to fruit juices and certain similar products intended for human consumption. Even though ordinary consumers cannot be expected to be familiar with the detailed rules (whereas consumer organizations definitely can), they are likely to adopt their style of argumentation to a certain degree to the specific context of a written formal complaint.

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and the practices evolving around them, can be seen as ‘‘form” imposed on a far more complex ‘‘substance”, i.e. the real-life situations that are within the scope of the rule in question, in order to make the real-life situations manageable in an institutionalized legal setting (Smith, 2007, 127ff; in continuation of Hjelmslev, 1953, 80ff; see also e.g. Teubner, 1998; Watson, 2000). This is bound to affect the argumentation of parties and decision-makers involved and not least, the final outcome of the cases. The findings of the review of the 821 cases are therefore likely to underestimate the influence of the sensory aspects on consumers’ complaint behaviour. Even so, the 89 instances of sensory elements (found in 53 cases) to be addressed in this study display a great variation of conflict scenarios and pose a number of obvious challenges to food manufacturers, at least to those of them who care about the fairness of their in-store food-to-consumer communication in addition to ensuring consumer liking and preference. This paper aims at providing a firmer basis for addressing sensory aspects of potentially misleading in-store food-to-consumer communication in operational terms. We suggest an exhaustive taxonomy of the diverse roles played by sensory elements and arguments in the case material examined. The assumptions and reasoning put forward by the parties and the administrative authorities in individual cases concerning the alleged misleading effect of specific food labelling solutions are generalized and ‘‘translated” into more explicit and exact theoretical terms, drawing on relevant insights found outside the legal sphere, mainly from semiotics, cognitive psychology, and cognitive linguistics. In this way, we establish a basis for formulating explicit research questions on the issues of concern and for isolating the variables relevant for testing experimentally the specific hypotheses and predictions that may emerge from these questions. Focusing mainly on two salient aspects of the overall taxonomy,2 i.e. cases where the physical product is interpreted as a communicative sign and cases where established food names contain sensory implications, we thus take a first step towards approaching the sensory aspects of fair in-store food-to-consumer communication in operational terms.

2. Context, materials and methods The present study is part of the cross-disciplinary research project ‘‘Spin or fair speak – when foods talk” (FairSpeak) at the Copenhagen Business School financed by the Programme Commission on Food and Health under the Danish Council for Strategic Research. The project is a collaboration between researchers in the fields of language & cognition, semiotics, visual perception, sensory evaluation, marketing, and law. The ultimate goal of the project is to provide a new, shared frame of reference for manufacturers, consumer organizations, and authorities for assessing the impact of in-store food-to-consumer communication from a fairness perspective, i.e. to lay down criteria for determining whether food labelling gives consumers a true and fair view of the properties of the food product in question. A key benchmark is the conception of fairness adopted by EU law in the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (2005/29/EC) and specifically applied to food labelling by the Food Regulation (2002/178/EC), the Labelling Directive (2000/13/EC), and other EU Acts, as implemented in the national legislation of the Member States. In effect, fairness in the EU law sense amounts to the absence of unfair practices, in the present case primarily belonging to the subcategory named misleading practices. Article 6 of the 2 The present study does not deal in detail with the other dimensions of the classification given in Fig. 1, i.e. sensory implications of novel food names and the sensory implications of verbal claims and illustrations, apart from the general remarks given in Section 3.

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Directive thus states: ‘‘A commercial practice shall be regarded as misleading if it contains false information and is therefore untruthful or in any way, including overall presentation, deceives or is likely to deceive the average consumer, even if the information is factually correct, in relation to one or more of the following elements, and in either case causes or is likely to cause him to take a transactional decision that he would not have taken otherwise: [. . .]”. While current legal and administrative practices are based primarily on lawyers’ and officials’ common-sense judgments on the ‘‘likeliness” aspect, the FairSpeak Project aims at making the legal criteria operational, i.e. susceptible to empirical testing. There are several challenges connected with this, including the prediction and testing of false inferences triggered by factually correct information, and combining measures of (potentially misguided) expectations and (potentially regrettable) transaction decisions in the formulation of specific hypotheses and experimental setups, in that these variables do not correlate as neatly in real-life consumer behaviour as assumed by EU legislators. These and other methodological issues are taken further in Smith, Clement, MøgelvangHansen, and Selsøe Sørensen (submitted for publication) and Smith et al. (2009). At the same time, outside the legal sphere the notion of fairness may be classified as a contested concept (Gallie, 1956; Garre, 1999) that is subject to permanent debate and adjustment under the influence of shifting agendas and clashes of interests in society. A practice may be accepted as legal according to current rules, but considered unfair for other reasons, and vice versa. A further aim is therefore to support the ongoing debate among the immediate actors (food manufacturers, NGOs, authorities and politicians) by establishing an empirical base for ascertaining the negative and positive effects on consumers’ understanding of various labelling elements and their interplay, rather than mapping out any broader conception of fairness that reaches beyond what is given by the law from the outset. In pursuing these aims, the project includes the development of an integrated cross-disciplinary framework for dealing with the complexity of the communication issues mentioned and of operational tools for measuring the impact of individual food naming and labelling solutions on empirical grounds. The general starting point of the project has been a study of cases concerning misleading presentation of food products. One of the aims of the study was to identify and specify different conflict scenarios of real-life importance, i.e. the various factors actually alleged by consumers and others to make food labels misleading in real-life situations dealt with by the food authorities. Another aim of the case study was to establish a realistic and comprehensive base of examples for identifying essential research questions and formulating specific hypotheses to be operationalized and tested in experiments. The overall corpus consists of cases concerning misleading presentation of food products registered by the Danish regional food authorities during 2002–2007 (Smith et al., 2009). In order to get a representative corpus of cases from the period, the cases selected for further analysis were identified in the following way: On the basis of file code numbers 12,210 cases were identified as potentially relevant. After a preliminary sorting made on basis of the title of the cases, 3847 were left. These cases were opened, and after an examination of their contents 821 cases turned out to concern misleading presentation of food brought before the food authorities by complainants or initiated by the authorities themselves. These cases were subject to further analysis and registration on relevant formal circumstances (parties and authorities involved, food category concerned, legal provisions applied, outcome, etc.) as well as qualitative content, i.e. on the one hand the different labelling elements allegedly causing consumers to be misled (brands, food

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names, verbal claims (text), mandatory information and/or nonverbal design elements, e.g. illustrations) and on the other hand various subject categories of the allegedly unjustified claim, etc., i.e. what the consumers were allegedly ‘‘misled about” (origin, content, production process, ecology & ethics, sensory, and/or nutrition & health). Furthermore, the arguments explicitly stated in the case files were registered and categorized. One of the findings of the study was that the allegedly misleading claim, etc. in 48% of the 821 cases concerned the content of the product, 26% nutrition and health, 10% the origin, 9% the production process, 4% ecology and ethics, and 3% sensory. For further details of the study, see Smith et al. (2009). The review of the case material has served as an important starting point for the identification of different conflict scenarios of real-life importance. Yet, since supposedly only a relatively small fraction of instances where consumers feel misled by the labelling of food results in a complaint to the food authorities, the case material cannot stand alone and is supplemented by information from other sources as the work proceeds, in particular, from the corporate partners and consumer organizations participating in the FairSpeak Project. For the present study, an additional review of the case material was performed focusing on the sensory element. As mentioned above the initial analysis of the 821 cases showed that one or more sensory elements had explicitly triggered the complaint in 28 cases only. However, an extended review of the bulk of cases revealed that one or more sensory element were indeed a significant factor in at least 53 cases, if also taking in consideration (a) cases where explicit verbal reference to sensory products attributes (taste, smell, texture, visual appearance, etc.) was made by the manufacturer or other actors involved, or by the authorities themselves, and (b) cases where the sensory properties of the food product were decisive to the very nature of the complaint, e.g. where it concerned the risk of confusing an innovative ‘‘sensory equivalent” to pizza cheese with real cheese due to the name given to it. Some cases involve more than one sensory dimension (e.g. the physical shape of the product inside the packaging, see Example 1 in Fig. 2, as well as an illustration showing it), for which reason a total of 89 instances of sensory elements were registered in the 53 cases. These are shown in Table 1. Further details on the subdivision of these instances into types will follow in Section 3.3 The present criteria for identifying sensory elements are relatively conservative, in that they would not extend to e.g. a case where the name of a salami led the consumer to expect that it was made in Italy, though the product was actually Danish. Indeed, the consumer’s disappointment may well have concerned the expected taste, and not (only) the origin, but assuming this would be pure guesswork on our part. While the present criteria allow us to eliminate noise on that account, they may also be showing us only the tip of an iceberg. There may be implicit sensory reasons hiding underneath. 3. A taxonomy of sensory elements in Danish cases on misleading food naming and labelling 2002–2007 Fig. 1 presents the 89 instances of sensory elements identified in a total of 53 cases in the shape of a taxonomy. The exemplifications given in the figure are for brief illustration only, while a more 3 In a couple of cases, the same labelling element has been registered as representing two different instances of sensory importance, e.g. the word Fresca (as part of Pasta Fresca). The very essence of the disagreement in this case was whether Fresca (‘fresh’) should be interpreted as an isolated (potentially misleading) verbal claim, or as an integral part of the food name, i.e. of Pasta Fresca, the meaning of which was claimed by the manufacturer not to be identical to the sum of its parts. The case was therefore classified as concerning both a verbal claim and the food name. For further details on classification, see Section 3.

Table 1 Eighty-nine instances of sensory elements identified in 53 cases grouped by type. Sensory elements

Instances

Percentage of (%)

Food name Verbal claim Illustration (where complaint concerns sensory property) Sensory property of physical product or wrapping

37 26 11

42 29 12

15

17

Total

89

100

comprehensive analysis of selected examples will follow in Sections 4 and 5. A first fundamental distinction must be drawn between those instances where sensory properties of the physical product itself are interpreted as a carrier of information, i.e. as a communicative sign, as further explained in Section 4, and those instances where sensory is (only) part of the challenged conceptual content (meaning) of a labelling element, the comprehension of which relies on other levels of decoding than immediate sensory perception, the clear-cut case being words and sentences in natural human language. Certainly, decoding a word like smoothie also involves auditive or visual perception of the sounds or letters that make up the word, but it is the conceptual content conveyed by the word that eventually matters, not the sound sequence, or letters representing it, ‘‘as such” (with the possible exception of sound-words, onomatopoeia, like yummy-yummi or slush which were not represented in the present material, see however Fischer & Nänny, 2001; Jakobson & Waugh, 1987). Yet again, a more detailed examination of that conceptual content sometimes raises the question of whether it can be reduced to factual (propositional) knowledge or should also include consumers’ immediate recall of sensory-motor experience with taste, texture, etc. as discussed in Section 5. This leads us straight back into sensory once again, only, this time on a conceptual level. As for the mode of expression, in semiotic terms originating from Peirce (1992 [1867–1893]) the majority of linguistic (verbal) signs can be classified as arbitrary symbols relying entirely on social convention, as distinguished from icons relying on immediate resemblance (e.g. picture of a strawberry) or indices relying on real-life experience (e.g. smoke indicating fire). The case with the physical product’s sensory properties ‘‘saying” something about the product itself can thus be seen as an extreme variant of the latter situation. A troublesome intermediate case, as far as food products are concerned, are illustrations. Illustrations owe much of their communicative potential to either iconicity (strawberry picture) and/or indexicality (e.g. a stylized picture of a microwave oven indicating that the product is microwavable) and hence to immediate sensory perception. Yet culture-specific conventions of ‘‘pictorial rhetoric” are generally assumed to play a substantial role here as well, though the degree to which they do and the exact mechanisms involved are subject to much debate (Forceville, 1996; Scott, 1994; Sonesson, 1989). In our categorization, illustrations were not included just by virtue of being (at least) ‘‘semi-sensory” signs in themselves, but only when they were interpreted by the complainant as specifically indicating something about sensory properties of the food product in question. That is, e.g. when a picture of strawberry was claimed to be misleading due to a complete lack of strawberry taste, but not e.g. when the strawberry taste was there, and not even questioned, but turned out to originate from artificial flavour according to other text on the packaging. And not when a picture of the Eiffel Tower was claimed to be misleading as regards the product’s physical origin without any explicit mention of addi-

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Fig. 1. Taxonomy of sensory elements in Danish cases on misleading food naming and labelling (2002–2007).

tional sensory expectations on that account. Out of 77 instances concerning illustrations in the overall corpus (Smith et al., 2009), this left us with only 11 ‘‘strictly” sensory ones in all, compared to 63 instances directly involving sensory among the names and verbal claims. As regards these linguistic (verbal) labelling elements, a distinction can be drawn between conflict scenarios involving food names, which convey an implicit identity statement, i.e. ‘‘This is (ham, whole milk, a smoothie, pepperoni, etc.)”, and verbal claims which convey attributive statements (e.g. ‘‘fresh”, ‘‘spicy”, ‘‘better than your mom’s”, etc.) ascribing some additional properties to the particular product inside the package. In the former case (‘‘this is ham, whole milk, a smoothie, pepperoni, etc.”), the sensory dimension (if present) comes down to whether or not sensory features (and which) are decisive to product identity, and hence down to whether one may legally refer to a given product as e.g. a smoothie. In the latter case (attributive statement, e.g. ‘‘fresh”, ‘‘spicy”, ‘‘better than your mom’s”, etc.), the sensory dimension (if present) comes down to whether or not particular adjectives and other attributive expressions which refer to sensory qualities are complied with by the product. A key difference here is that for claims the sensory quality in question is verbalized by its ‘‘own” word or phrase, whereas this is rarely the case for food names, unless a sensory component is actually built into the structure of the name itself, e.g. soft tortillas. (The same might be argued for smoothies, but they nevertheless have to have other properties than that of being ‘‘smooth” in order to be accepted as such.) In the case of names, a final distinction must be drawn between the conflict scenarios that emerge from established (generic) names that all actors (consumers, manufacturers, authorities, etc.) already connect with a more or less well-delimited conceptual content – here the challenge is whether they can agree on that content and how it is best described, see Section 5.2 – and novel food names, where the challenge relates to the gradual formation of a novel concept by consumers as well as other actors, and the role that sensory elements will come to play in that concept. We will have most to say on the former aspect in this article, while the latter is also briefly illustrated at the end of Section 5.2 (see Gill & Dubé, 2007; Smith, 2009; Zlatev, Smith, van de Weijer, & Skydsgaard, in press for further considerations on novel product names). To save space, the detailed analyses to follow will thus concentrate on two essential dimensions of the above classification,

namely, first, the case where the physical product is (also) interpreted as a communicative sign and, second, the role of sensory elements in assessing the misleading potential of established, or at least relatively well-known, food names. The sensory implications of entirely novel food names for novel products as well as of verbal claims and illustrations, however, definitely deserve additional attention in future work.

4. Focus I: Sensory as signs A widely accepted definition of a sign is that it is ‘‘something that stands for something (else) to somebody”, be it a word, a sentence, a number, a picture, or red spot on a patient’s chest indicating the presence of some disease (for discussion and alternative definitions, see Chandler, 2002; Krampen, Oehler, Posner, Sebeok, & Uexküll, 1987; Nöth, 1990). As already indicated, some signs are interpreted as such by mere convention, notably linguistic (verbal) and numerical signs,4 but the same is true of many non-verbal signs to a less absolute degree. A stylized picture of a microwave oven on a pack of convenience food is thus not just communicating to us due to its resemblance to a real one (iconicity) and people’s general real-life experience with food and microwaving (indexicality), but also by conventions as to how exactly a manufacturer can nowadays be expected to inform the consumer that this particular product is microwavable. However, there are cases where the recipients and/or senders appear to make up the communicative conventions for themselves as they go along. For example, a vacuum cleaner in a closet is just a vacuum cleaner. But a vacuum cleaner found by a husband on top of his favourite armchair when he comes home from work might be interpreted by him as a hint (sign) from his wife relating to their distribution of domestic duties. Such uses of everyday objects as vehicles for intentional communication have been subject to recent theoretical interest (Tylén, 2009; Tylén, Wallentin, & Roepstorff, 2009; Clark, 1996, 2006) and experimental research documenting that the psychological switch to interpreting such objects as communicative, in view of the circumstances, correlates with a shift to 4 To understand a claim like e.g. 30% less fat the consumer thus needs to be familiar with the conventionalized codes known as English and the Arabic numeral system, and the immediate sensory perception of these letters and numbers has nothing to do with that content whatsoever.

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Fig. 2. Examples 1–3: Conflict scenarios involving sensory properties of physical product.

activation patterns in the human brain that are normally associated with human language and communicative behaviour (Tylén et al., 2009). As for our present subject, the case material reviewed contains at least 14 instances where the complainant and/or authorities argue along very similar lines while expressing themselves in less exact common-sense terms (and without referring to neurolinguistic evidence). See Examples 1–3 in Fig. 2. In Example 1, the immediate visual perception of the shape of the product is argued to lead the consumer to interpret it as a whole fish fillet, not as a cut up of several (but still pure) fillets shaped into one, which is the actual case. In Example 2, the red5 colour of the fruit drink (together with its taste and illustrations of raspberries) are argued to tell the consumer that it is primarily made of raspberries, which is not the case. In Example 3, the use of ‘‘tasteless smoke” leads to an absence of sensory indicators that would otherwise have suggested that the product had exceeded its normal best-before limit (though any health hazards connected with this are eliminated by the very same treatment). Example 4 in Fig. 3 illustrates a slightly different variant of the present scenario where it is not the physical product, but the sensory properties of its physical wrapping that are claimed to mislead consumers regarding the drink inside, in casu, for creating a ‘‘pure orange sensation” that cannot be matched by the drink itself. In Example 5, both the shape of the product (capsules) and the packaging are claimed to make the product look like a diet supplement (if not a ‘‘real” drug) despite verbal indications to the contrary on the same packaging. These and similar examples pose severe theoretical and methodological challenges to the assessment of food-to-consumer communication from a fairness perspective that have not been explored in depth before. For one thing, there are several problems of definition. If we stick to defining a sign as ‘‘something that stands for something (else) to somebody”, then e.g. an animal’s bleeding telling a hunter that he has hit it with his first shot would also be a sign. Yet the animal is not communicating. It is just bleeding. Something similar might be argued for (and, indeed, by) the manufacturers in our present cases: That they have merely developed a new product. Some theorists, including Tylén and colleagues mentioned above, include intentionality as an additional defining criterion for signs, at least communicative signs. This 5 For interpretation of colour in Figs. 2 and 3, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.

solves the above problem, but leaves the issue of proof rather open, as further addressed below. At the same time, ‘‘standing for something else” and ‘‘to somebody” are troublesome in our present cases as well. As for ‘‘something else”, consumers are not taken to understand the product as anything but – the product. They have merely misconceived the nature of it. (Examples 4 and 5, of course, constitute a different case in this regard.) Put differently, the signifier (the sign itself), and the signified (what it stands for), are 100% identical. Moreover, the consumer (i.e. ‘‘somebody”) can hardly be said to have conceived the tangible product as a communicative sign in the first place if (s)he has indeed been mislead by it – only as something that it was not. The semiotic (re)analysis comes in only when, and if, the misconception is recognized by the consumer, i.e. in the shape of ex-post (re)considerations. None of this alters the fact that consumers can experience that they have been misled in cases like the present which, in turn, would seem to justify the development of customized tools for preventing such negative experiences through pre-testing. Among the variables discussed above, it seems that it is the effect that the sensory qualities of the physical product may have on consumers’ (accompanying) expectations, and hence potential behaviour, which it is most realistic to isolate and measure in a controlled experimental setting. Measuring the alternative criterion of manufacturers’ communicative intentions is hardly a viable path, not only because manufacturers are a highly complex bodies of individuals not immediately susceptible to mind-mapping, but mainly because such tests would naturally be performed by manufacturers who actually care about the fairness of food communication, which renders their intentions beyond questioning a priori. On a more general level, the examples just considered demonstrate the subtle line between product development and market communication and the challenge of where exactly that line should be draw from a legal, ethical, and practical viewpoint.

5. Focus II: Sensory components in the conceptual content of food names A totally different place is occupied by sensory elements in the second focus of this study, namely the misleading potential of food names. Here the sensory properties of the carrier of conceptual content are only linked to that content itself, and, through that, to the food denoted, in a highly indirect fashion, namely through the second-order convention known as human language. Unless

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Fig. 3. Examples 4–5: Conflict scenarios involving sensory properties of physical product wrapping.

familiar with the specific convention known as Danish, consumers would make no sense of food names like rullepølse or sødmælk whatsoever, sensory or other.6 Yet if they are, the sensory properties of the food may be decisive to whether the name is accepted as a correct designation of it or not. That judgment depends on whether the experienced sensory properties of the food match our ‘‘mental checklist” for that particular kind of food, which means that our present focus is bound to involve ‘‘working with ideas about stimuli rather than with the physical stimuli themselves‘‘ (Moskowitz, Reisner, Itty, Katz, & Krieger, 2006, p. 537), i.e. modelling consumer concepts (see also e.g. Ares, Giménez, & Gámbaro, 2008; Lee & O’Mahony, 2005; Potter, Rosenstock, Schraidt, & Kroll, 2004). The present case material contains 272 instances where the food name is either the primary subject of the conflict scenario or part of it. Out of these, only 37 can be argued to directly involve sensory elements according to the criteria outlined in Section 2. Whether this indicates a limited relevance of sensory attributes to assessing the fairness of food naming, or that such overt cases are just the tip of a larger iceberg is a question to which we will return shortly. 5.1. What’s in a (food) name? ‘‘Having a word for it” is essential to our day-to-day (re)identification and categorization of phenomena and objects in the infinite variety of extra-linguistic reality (for further unfolding and discussion of this basic view, see Gumperz & Levinson, 1996; Piaget, 1926; Steinberg & Sciarini, 2006; Vygotsky, 1962 [1934]). In the case of foods, the name is not only essential to the product’s’ cognitive identity, but also to its legal identity. According to the Danish administrative regulation 1308/2005, §§ 10 and 15–16 (implementing Directive 2000/13/EC relating to the labelling, presentation and advertising of foodstuffs), it is compulsory on the labelling of foodstuffs to indicate the name under which the product is sold, so that consumers can check if what they are buying is e.g. cannelloni, spaghetti or gnocchi. Still, consumers sometimes feel misled when they compare the name found on the package to the product inside and/or additional text on the same packaging, and complain about it to the authorities. The underlying issue here is not what the name sounds, looks, or ‘‘feels” like, but what it means. From a cognitive linguistic viewpoint, the meaning of a (food) name can be equated to a psychologically real concept which is conflated by language, but also serves the wider purpose of catego6 An exception here are sound-words like yummy-yummi or slush, as mentioned earlier. Moreover, words that are not covered by the conventions of any given language (i.e. part of its general word stock) may still convey a sensory impression by creatively interacting with such conventions, e.g. nørdic in the brand name Nørdic Mist which is supposed to give association cool, Nordic, clear. We are indebted to an anonymous reviewer for reminding us of the latter subtle point and suggesting the present example.

rization in the course of situated thinking and acting, e.g. while shopping or eating (Cohen & Lefebvre, 2005; Lakoff, 1987; Ratneshwar, Barsalou, Pechmann, & Moore, 2001; Talmy, 2000). Following, primarily, Barsalou (1983, 1987, 1999, 2005) whose approach, in turn, incorporates earlier theorizing and experimental evidence on prototypicality and graded conceptual structure (e.g. Rosch, 1975; Smith, Shoben, & Rips, 1973; Taylor, 1989), the basic ‘‘anatomy” of human concepts may be displayed as illustrated in Fig. 4. Rather than understanding concepts as static entities permanently present in the mind of anyone who ‘‘has” the concept in question (as tacitly assumed in a great many accounts), they are here understood as time-bound ‘‘samples” of generic and episodic information retrieved from long-term memory to facilitate categorization in the course of situated thinking and acting. Speaking metaphorically, they can be seen as ‘‘wave crests” that rise from the ‘‘sea” of general world knowledge, delivering the criteria needed for performing a particular categorization. This analysis extends both to concepts actualized for sheer ad hoc purposes – e.g. for distinguishing things that one needs for an upcoming camping trip from all the things that one doesn’t need to take – and categories that play a permanent role in a person’s understanding of reality, e.g. baked beans or friends. There is however an important difference as to linguistic expression, in that concepts of the former kind will usually have to be communicated by more complex paraphrases or given mere ad hoc names like my camping stuff, whereas concepts of the latter kind will prototypically have been provided with a single, generally accepted name such as baked beans or friend. Novel food (like all other) names constitute a challenging transitory case between these two extremes, as illustrated by the name Pizzatop considered at the end of Section 5.2 (see also Smith, 1999/2000, 2001, 2009; Zlatev et al., in press). The ‘‘mental checklist” retrieved from long-term memory is modelled in Fig. 4 as a hierarchic structure consisting of essential components which correspond to properties that any object must possess in order to be accepted as a member of the category in question – e.g. that cheese should be made of milk – and prototypical components which correspond to properties that are a salient part of people’s conceptualization of the category as a whole, but do not need to be manifest with any particular exemplar for it to be accepted as a (less prototypical) category member – e.g. that a prototypical cheese is made of cow milk, though goat or even horse milk can be used for making cheese too. For the components isolated on both levels, a further distinction can be drawn between those of them that rely on factual knowledge potentially reducible to logical propositions susceptible to truth-conditional evaluation – e.g. knowledge of which ingredients a drink should contain in order to be accepted as a smoothie – and those of them that rely on immediate recall of the taste, smell, texture, etc. of smoothies that one has previously encountered. In the following, we will refer to such components as propositional and sensory components, respectively.

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Fig. 4. The concepts as a time-bound graded structure (state).

On this background, let us now consider the role of sensory attributes (and corresponding conceptual components) in the assessment of the misleading potential of established food names.

5.2. Propositional knowledge vs. sensory memory Examples 6–9 in Fig. 5 all concern the question of what exactly a food name which is (more or less) familiar to all actors involved means, or should mean. In Example 6, the answer would seem to be given in advance in that the product is covered by a food standard.7 However, the standard concerns fat content, and what the consumer is concerned about is taste. In Example 7 there are no food standards to resort to, and, moreover, the product name (and type) may still be relatively new and negotiable to some consumers. Yet the complainant clearly seems to operate with certain fixed criteria, and these concern the sensory impression of the product. Nevertheless, ‘‘hard facts” in terms of low content of fruit (0.2%) end up being decisive to the outcome of the case alone. It therefore seems fair to ask how the matter should have been settled if the ‘‘smoothie feeling” had been simulated better, yet by using e.g. artificial flavouring, colourants, wood fibres, etc., rather than adding more fruit. In Example 8, we once again observe a clash between ‘‘hard facts” about ingredients and methods of preparation, and consumers’ (alleged) sensory preferences and liking. In addition, the number and type of evaluation criteria accessible to and potentially applicable by different real-life actors of relevance (manufacturers, gastronomic experts, and consumers) are clearly not the same. A similar situation is displayed in Example 9, with the additional circumstance that the product has in fact been significantly modified as to ingredients compared to current benchmark products on the market which carry the same name. Yet the modification concerns ‘‘only” the main ingredients and fat content, while the key sensory properties have been maintained. So what should be decisive? 7 Council Regulation 1234/2007 establishing a common organization of agricultural markets and on specific provisions for certain agricultural products article 114, cf. Annex XIII.

The examples raise several essential questions concerning the ‘‘sensory fairness” of food-to-consumer communication. A key problem seems to be that different actors (consumers, manufacturers, gastronomic experts, government officials, etc.) operate with different ‘‘variants” of the concepts under dispute, containing different numbers and ‘‘mixtures” of sensory and propositional components, and displaying different lines of demarcation between the essential and prototypical ones of them (see Fig. 4). To cope with this, it is tempting to apply Putnam’s (1975) hypothesis of ‘‘division of linguistic labour” the essence of which is that members of society collaborate on knowing the exact criteria for applying the words they use correctly: Most society members will connect the word only with a vague (and not exactly the same) stereotype, yet when in doubt, they will ultimately rely on the judgment of those members of society that have been given the status of ‘‘experts”. The hypothesis is liable to criticism on several accounts (Briscoe, 2006; Talmage, 1998; Ware, 1978), including its lack of distinction between ‘‘division of labour” and polysemy, i.e. the fact that a word can have several related, but still distinct, meanings, and terminologization, i.e. the fact that a commonly known word can have a more restrictive definition in a specialized context (e.g. Sager, 1997). The key question in our present context, if stated in terms of slot/filler-based conceptual analysis, is whether the ‘‘expert’s final judgment” should be understood as an additional essential component or ‘‘empty slot” which is built into ordinary consumers’ concept of the food in question, and for which only the expert can provide the required ‘‘filler”. This might well prove to be the case for luxury product like caviar or foie gras (yet this remains to be demonstrated), but can the analysis be extended to include macaroons or rullepølse in the above examples? Additional questions would be: Who are the relevant experts? And is the only viable (and the right) solution national and cross-national food standards, as argued by some while questioned by others in the EU debate? Even more so since in many cases it is the authenticity of the product rather than sensory aspects that is the primary concern here. The examples furthermore demonstrate a steady ‘‘competition” between sensory attributes (and corresponding conceptual components) relying on first-order perceptual experience, e.g. the feel and

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Fig. 5. Examples 6–9: Conflict scenarios with sensory dimension related to conceptual content of established food names.

taste of macaroons, and propositional knowledge (and components) relying, to a wide extent, on second-order information gained through other, verbal, means (text on the packaging, the mass media, cookbooks, product lab tests, etc.), e.g. about the methods and ingredients used for producing macaroons commercially. Moreover, the ‘‘competition” seems to manifest itself both in the underlying conceptual structures themselves, and in the actors’ selection of ammunition for explicit argumentation when drawing on the total ‘‘pool” of conceptual components available to them. This has important bearings on the tip-or-the-iceberg assumption discussed earlier in that it may explain the ‘‘anatomy” of the iceberg. Propositional components have a strong advantage when it comes to ‘‘reaching the surface” in the explicit arguments put forward in the case files, in that they rely on pre-verbalized knowledge available in abundance in society and suited for truth-conditional evaluation due to the intrinsic design features of human language (for further discussion of the pivotal, but complex, role played by assessments of truth values in the decoding of natural human language, as opposed to their less unambiguous role in e.g. formal logic, see e.g. Carston, 2002; Dascal, 2003; Lyons, 1977). It may therefore be hypothesized that in a great many complains concerning food names which do not explicitly address sensory properties, but focus on ingredients, physical origin, etc., the complainant has simply ruled out the possibility of explaining the wider implications of these ‘‘hard facts” for his or her sensory liking of the product a priori. If so, we have, indeed, only seen the tip of an iceberg. The questions that naturally follow are which product properties should be considered decisive from a fairness perspective, and why. Put differently: Is product identity a matter of facts or of taste? A more far-reaching answer to that question is beyond the scope of the present article, though not of the FairSpeak Project at large. At this stage it suffices to note that testing the limits of consumer acceptance of name–product combinations while systematically varying and clearly separating the sensory and propositional (verbal) stimuli presented to them might contribute highly relevant new evidence to these considerations. A further consideration is whether there is a need for different fairness criteria in cases of product repetition (yet another brand

of whole milk, macaroons, etc.) as distinguished from product evolution where established products and their conceptualizations are challenged, as illustrated by Example 9 for a current challenge (the new low-fat rullepølse), while Example 8 illustrates a conflict rooted more than 60 years ago, and thus perhaps obsolete (or never properly prevented?). As mentioned initially, we will not go into the even more challenging case of food naming in the scenario of product innovation where the consumer needs to gradually conceptualize an entirely new type of product by matching the cues offered by the (novel) name with additional cues on the packaging and his or her general background knowledge (see however Gill & Dubé, 2007; Libben & Jarema, 2006; Smith, 2009; Zlatev et al., in press). As for sensory dimensions, cases in point are e.g. a complaint about the name Halal kogt picnic skinke (‘Halal boiled picnic ham’)8 on a product which was made to look, feel, and taste like ham, yet without disobeying a religious prohibition against eating pork (as guaranteed by the word Halal), or the names Pizzatop and Pizzatopping9 for a sensory equivalent to ‘‘real” pizza cheese, which is however not cheese. . . and does not explicitly claim so, but was accused of being misleading anyway.

6. Concluding remarks The study of the Danish administrative cases on misleading presentation of food products presented above is a first step towards approaching the sensory aspects of fair in-store food-to-consumer communication in operational terms. By focusing on actual cases where consumers feel that they have been misled about – or, indeed, by – sensory attributes of the product, it is possible to gain a new insight into the place and significance of sensory elements in the context of food labelling fairness. The study showed that less than 7% of the 821 cases reviewed overtly involve sensory properties of the food product in question. These findings may however well underestimate the influence of the sensory aspects on the complaint behaviour of consumers 8 9

Case No. 2003-10-274-00462 (id 177) CONSUMER. Case Nos. 2006-N4-274-00998 (508) DAF; 2006-N4-274-00999 (id 509) DAF.

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and consumer organizations in view of the inherent cognitive and linguistic complications connected with verbalizing sensory experience as compared to ‘‘hard” factual information when challenging the correctness of information given. Moreover, this tendency is likely to be particularly marked in the context of legal decisionmaking. The cases that actually contain sensory aspects nevertheless display great variation, raise quite subtle questions, and offer a basis for laying down a taxonomy of the roles played by sensory elements when consumers claim (or are claimed to) be misled by particular food naming or labelling solutions, or, ultimately, by the sensory properties of the physical food itself. Thus, the dual role of sensory elements as both means of expression and parts of the conceptual content conveyed by non-sensory (verbal) means calls for different lines of analysis. The case material provides a basis for identifying essential research questions and formulating specific hypotheses to be operationalized and tested in coming experiments. The ongoing research within the FairSpeak Project includes e.g. tests of limits to consumer acceptance of product evolution by comparing responses to sensory and to propositional (verbal) stimuli, respectively, and consumers’ interpretation of novel food names for sensorically innovative products in view of different additional cues given on the surrounding labelling. The experimental approach may be a first step towards the development of a ‘‘sensory forensics” to assist decision-makers dealing with the legal prohibition against misleading presentation of food products and improve the factual basis for legal decisions made in this area. At any rate, further research in the area is likely to create new tools for pre-testing the ‘‘sensory fairness” of food products as part of self-regulatory measures taken by food manufacturers. References Ares, G., Giménez, A., & Gámbaro, A. (2008). Understanding consumers’ perception of conventional and functional yogurts using word association and hard laddering. Food Quality and Preference, 19(7), 636–643. Barsalou, L. W. (1983). Ad hoc categories. Memory & Cognition, 11(3), 211–227. Barsalou, L. W. (1987). The instability of graded structure: Implications for the nature of concepts. In U. Nesser (Ed.), Concepts and conceptual development: Ecological and intellectual factors in categorization (pp. 101–139). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barsalou, L. W. (1999). Perceptual symbol systems. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 22(4), 577–609. Barsalou, L. W. (2005). Situated conceptualization. In H. Cohen & C. Lefebvre (Eds.), Handbook of categorization in cognitive science (pp. 619–650). Amsterdam: Elsevier. Briscoe, R. (2006). Individualism, externalism and idiolectical meaning. Synthese, 152(1), 95–128. Carston, R. (2002). Thoughts and utterances. The pragmatics of explicit communication. Oxford: Blackwell. Chandler, D. (2002). Semiotics: The basics. London: Routledge. Clark, H. H. (1996). Using language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, H. H. (2006). Material symbols. Philosophical Psychology, 19(3), 291–307. Cohen, H., & Lefebvre, C. (Eds.). (2005). Handbook of categorization in cognitive science. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Dascal, M. (2003). Interpretation and understanding. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fischer, O., & Nänny, M. (2001). The motivated sign. Iconicity in language and literature (Vol. 2). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Forceville, C. (1996). Pictorial metaphor in advertising. London/New York: Routledge. Gallie, W. B. (1956). Essentially contested concepts. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 56, 167–198. Garre, M. (1999). Human rights in translation. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press. Gill, T., & Dubé, L. (2007). What is a leather iron or a bird phone? Using conceptual combinations to generate and understand new product concepts. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 17(3), 202–217. Grunert, K. G. (2005). Food quality and safety: Consumer perception and demand. European Review of Agricultural Economics, 32(3), 369–391. Grunert, K. G. (2007). How consumers perceive food quality. In L. Frewer & H. van Trijp (Eds.), Understanding consumers of food products (pp. 181–199). Cambridge: Woodhead Publishing. Gumperz, J. J., & Levinson, S. C. (Eds.). (1996). Rethinking linguistic relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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