Is there an app or a site that tracks brands and tests their claims of what's in their food? I'm always curious especially when buying olive oil if what I'm buying is actually real. I think the biggest issue is consumers have no way of knowing what's actually in the food they eat. If the information were readily available it'd be much harder to push food substitutes.
YES :-)
Open Food Facts is an open, collaborative effort to try to make more sense of food and food packagings.
A bit like Wikipedia, but for food.
Using smartphones, you can scan any food item and get detailed info about what you're about to buy/eat.
If it's not yet in the database, you can help by taking a picture
Since we collect all claims and labels, and nutrition info, we can see if your cheese is actually low fat cheese, or just in the average.
You can
- compare between countries, brands, whatever you like…
- easily create comparison charts
- much much more
We're looking for volunteer contributors and developers from all over the world to:
- translate it to more languages
- add food from your fridge
- enhance the apps and web version
Is there a way to sign in to my account on the Android app, take a bunch of pictures of my food, then sit at my computer to do all the typing while looking at the photos I just took?
Not really, and I can't say I blame them - the amount of work, resources, and various research fields you'd need in order to maintain such a database would be pretty big. Plus, it seems like it'd be a legal nightmare, even if the site was in the right 100% of the time legally and scientifically.
Basically, as much as I would like something like that, it seems to me that the cost would be too great to maintain well and the necesary knowledge for the site to have would also be great. Even if they relied on volunteer research, it's still a lot to aggregate, and also probably easily subverted with UPC updates, brand switching, and consumer apathy. Plus, I'm' not entirely sure that it would have the intended effect of making people demand higher quality food.
I'm trying to find the report, but I recall reading that after being on a diet of canned and other low quality foods for a long time, a person can become averse to fresh foods, preferring the taste of the lower quality foods just because it's what they're mentally used to - a peach tastes like "this" (canned in syrup), not like a fresh peach. Spinach is "bad" because it's slimy and has no texture (frozen spinach), not like good fresh and tasty spinach.
Given how used we are to the olive oils and fish and such, I do wonder if we'd have the otherworldly experience or if we'd more wonder why our olive oil has a weird taste and why our sushi tastes different.
Ah, but that's only a one-directional test. Cheap oil is obviously not olive oil, but that doesn't help you choose in the supermarket aisle if the expensive oil is also not olive oil.
(And, in fact, the expensive oil being the fake is rather the whole point: the Italian Mafia wants to sell something cheap as something expensive and capture the margin; there's no point in just selling something cheap as something cheap.)
In switzerland the WWF has a very good overview over all (mostly swiss) labels for meat, fish and all other kinds of food. I suggest to checkout one of those very critic organizations.
