Dairy industry wants flexibility with yogurt

If low-fat yogurt is blended with fatty ingredients like coconut or chocolate, is it still low-fat? Is it even yogurt?

The U.S. government has rules about what can be called “yogurt,” and the dairy industry says it’s not clear what the answers are. Now it’s hopeful it will finally get to use the term with greater liberty, with the Trump administration in the process of updating the yogurt definition.

The industry push to open up the yogurt standard illustrates how fraught it can be to define a food, especially as manufacturing practices and consumer tastes change.

Timothy Lytton, a professor of law at Georgia State University, notes the economic and political factors that determine food standards. “These are social constructions,” Lytton said.

Government standards exist for a range of packaged foods, mostly for one-time pantry staples such as bread, jam and canned peas. The standards were supposed to ensure a level of quality as mass production took hold decades ago.

But writing those rules sometimes turned into a bureaucratic nightmare — peanut butter’s definition took more than a decade — and regulators eventually stopped setting new standards. That’s part of the reason foods like ketchup have rules, but others like mustard don’t.

The ongoing dispute over yogurt offers a taste of how sour things can get.

The Food and Drug Administration established a standard for foods labelled as “yogurt” in 1981 that limited its ingredients. The industry swiftly objected. The following year, the agency suspended enforcement on various provisions and allowed the addition of preservatives.

A never-finalized 2009 proposal offered a unified standard and allowed emulsifiers as well. The yogurt industry says that has cultivated confusion and left it vulnerable to lawsuits.