Wherever the baseline intelligence quotient of John Q. Public sits on an absolute scale, when we&#x27;re discussing something as critical and universal as food distribution, it should be pretty easy to accept that, at a minimum, the median IQ should be accommodated. It should be easy for the consumer to understand what&#x27;s in the food he&#x27;s going to eat. Manually picking up every food item and reviewing the list of ingredients by hand in the middle of grocery store does not comport with this; this is a matter of efficiency more than a lack of the intellectual faculty to process a list of ingredients (though when half of those ingredients are impenetrable chemical names that only commercial food chemists understand, it makes even <i>more</i> sense to skip it).<p>Lament the average consumer&#x27;s lack of gross intelligence all you want, but the fact is that it&#x27;s irrelevant in this circumstance. Food distribution should be accessible and understandable by nearly all adults, and if it&#x27;s not, it&#x27;s a systemic failure, not an individual one.<p>This is especially true now that <i>all</i> of the food for sale in a typical grocery store is altered by chemists. This artificial manipulation should cause us to be <i>more</i> careful about food, not less.<p>It is absolutely true that nearly every food item in the mainstream grocery store contains superfluous sugar, including foods that you wouldn&#x27;t expect or think about. While many stores will carry one or two SKUs of a particular product without sugar, you have to be really careful to pick out the right one. For instance, canned pears come &quot;in heavy syrup&quot; (i.e., drenched in sugar) by default. They also offer pears in &quot;light syrup&quot; (i.e., sugar added). There are various combinations of heavy&#x2F;light syrup canned pear offerings, and then, at the very back, you may luck out and find one can of pears &quot;in water&quot;.<p>These aren&#x27;t Oreos -- people are buying canned fruits and vegetables because they are trying to be healthy, and the corporate grocers are pulling a fast one on them by dumping large helpings of sugar into <i>everything</i> to try to make the food more addictive (and thereby, increase sales).<p>Corporate profiteering absolutely plays a massive role in the obesity epidemic. Discounting that is playing into their hands at the peril of public health.