lil brown bat

That opens up a huge can of worms, since the companies that make products that use these things are very good at getting their addicts, excuse me customers, to form lynch mobs that threaten to rip the lips off them lib'rul elite politicians who are trying to take away their Crisco. I think that one thing government can do, though, is enact and enforce regulation on honesty in labeling. Case in point, a few years back McDonalds used to advertise their french fries as "made with 100% vegetable oil". Any sensible person would take that to mean that 100% of the oil used to fry their french fries is vegetable oil, since the alternative interpretation is "some of what our french fries are fried in is vegetable oil, and that vegetable oil is...100% vegetable oil, yessirreebob!" Unfortunately, the alternative interpretation is the truth, and McDonalds frying mix consisted in part of vegetable oil, and in part of beef tallow. Even more unfortunately, the person who discovered this was a Jain who had previously been a big fan of McDonalds fries, under the mistaken but reasonable belief that eating them was not a violation of his religious principles.

It was a slyly calculated piece of marketing in which McDonalds cynically took advantage of the disparity between how a reasonable and sensible person would interpret a statement, and how the statement could be contorted to mean something very different. Disingenuous disclaimers to the contrary, this was quite deliberate. This sort of thing deserves a beat-down, and until such beat-downs are handed out, this kind of deceptive marketing and labeling will continue.