I already explained to one person who thought their jurisdiction was not covered by these laws that, yeah, they are. This is standard practice - not something outrageous. We aren’t going to agree, but I’d love for you to find a place that has no regulation of their food labeling. Even South Africa does - they don’t allow images that misrepresent food content BECAUSE they have such a high illiteracy rate.
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I don’t ask for NO regulation. I ask for honesty in labeling re listing ingredients, but relaxed approach to artwork itself. If people cannot read, well, that’s a different problem. First World is not, and shouldn’t be, South Africa. Catering to the dumb won’t make world any better. If literacy is a problem, teach people reading.
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Having again just walked through the beer aisle at Safeway (on the way to grab some tomatoes)/I’d have to say artwork regulations are indeed pretty relaxed.
This article focused only on six extreme examples from 30,000 examples. All of them actually fell under rules that made sense based on labeling law. The one person who chimed in here that has had any personal experience with Battle had nothing but respect for him. You should probably take that into account.
I don’t disrespect the person. I however don’t have much respect for that law.
We know about at least 6 problematic examples. I don’t understand why label graphics needs approval at all; if all the direct claims are truthful and complete, no reason to not greenlight it even if it has a bunch of drunk and barfing penguins.
I don’t want the society where an official approval is needed even to fart.
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@shaddack - We don’t even know if all these examples came from one year - and most were from imports trying to enter the American market, so they weren’t aware of labeling law here. Even if it was all from one year that makes the rate of complaint in this article 0.02% of the time!!!
You’d really do far better spending your time railing this hard against something like errors on death row - which occur possibly 4% of the time.
This is just ridiculous, and you are wasting my time. No more.
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Which is quite an underestimation of the real rate, as we know a subset of complaints but we know the total. So while the article documents 0.02%, we can claim with high certainty that the rate is AT LEAST 0.02%, and possibly fairly higher.
That is a problem, of course. But that is also a pretty well-manned problem discussed on places that I do not frequent, and unlike rampant paperwork it does not happen anymore in Europe.
So I guess Blackened Voodoo Lager passed muster (at least with whoever had the job at the time):
This was briefly banned at the state level, in Texas, because the TABC believed that the label suggested the occult. Ultimately the decision was reversed, though not before Louisiana threatened to ban Lone Star.
Throughout the entire brouhaha (no pun intended), this bottle and its label was available all along, somehow having already passed muster with the TABC:
(I still have a Blackened Voodoo shirt)
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Meanwhile, in Canada, there are beers that actually do contain hemp and show hemp leaves on all the packaging and advertising they can manage.
And yeah, hemp isn’t marijuana, but the tie-in implication is certainly there. Cheerfully so.
But done it doesn’t actually have any marijuana in it, it’s fine.
So sorry, yes, about this particular thing America is being weird. And if the Australians are the same (could someone confirm?) they’re being weird too.
None of those help someone like me, who’s allergic to artifical sweeteners (like they put in Smirnoff Ice, I found out the hard way) and some preservatives (which they put in nearly all ciders, I also found out the hard way). Nothing like having an allergic reaction interacting with an alcohol buzz.
People can and are allergic to just about anything. I know someone who’s been allergic to celery her whole life. Selective labels don’t help; ingredients lists do.
Instead I stick to craft and/or stuff that claims it’s been made the same way since the 19th century or earlier, and thank the universe I don’t get life-threatening reactions.
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I honestly would prefer compulsory ingredient labels. Case in point, few ‘banana beers’ actually contain banana.
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Either way, those bottles should carry some sort of Minimum Safe Distance warning in addition to the standard alcohol one.
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Ha! My SO loves’em. I can’t stand them 
@gadgetgirl02 - I’m not making any comment at all about whether or not beers can or should contain hemp in the U.S.
FDA law requires that you not suggest consumables contain things they don’t ACTUALLY contain.
You missed the point entirely.
I also already confirmed that the Aussies (and NZ) do this as well. Follow the links provided.
Hi @Gyrofrog - Yep, state law may be MORE restrictive than federal law on licensing images for labels, based on their own local issues.
Federal law has no problem with imaginary beings like faries, dragons, demons, angels, Satan, or Santa. The problem with Santa on the label in the article was that he depicted someone actively drunk, and that’s not allowed.
Just so you know, I would love for there to be compulsory ingredient labeling on alcoholic beverages. I have the same allergy you do - to artificial sweeteners. It tends to run in families.
That said, the ingredient listing is a wholly separate issue from graphics depicting drunk behavior labeling verbiage that sounds like an ingredient is included that doesn’t appear in the beverage. Not everyone can or does read labels, but advertising images and tag lines are designed to get people to buy. They’re on the front and in large print.
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You said a beer label with LEGAL WEED on it would be misleading and
unacceptable. I say the evidence is already out there that’s not so.
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Your free unregulated game appears to have conditions. The rules that Martin enforces are the ones you suggest. I like your database suggestion and then someone, or many distributed someones, like the manufacturers, have to maintain that.
…and maybe one hard-working bureaucrat to make sure it happens.
I wasn’t the one who made that call. The person who has that job is the one who made that call. What I said was that if the bottle didn’t have any other references to the city, and the fact that the city was named “Weed” and the company was using a cannabis-themed advertising campaign (they are), then they were falsely implying on those bottles that the bottle contained hemp.
This beer DOESN’T contain hemp.
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