FEDS BAN ‘LOVE’

(As an ingredient)

Eat your heart out! The humorless US Food and Drug Administration has ordered an artisan bakery to remove “love” from the list of ingredients on its packets of granola — arguing that it isn’t something you can actually put in the breakfast food.

“Ingredients required to be declared on the label or labeling of food must be listed by their common or usual name,” the FDA wrote in a letter to Nashoba Brook Bakery last month, following an earlier inspection.

“‘Love’ is not a common or usual name of an ingredient.”

The West Concord, Mass., bakery said the rebuke felt a little Orwellian.

“It sounds so silly,” Nashoba Brook CEO John Gates told The Post.

“I don’t know how [people would] think we get ‘love’ in there unless we’re doing something I’m not going to get quoted saying — and we’re not doing that, I assure you.”

Love has been listed as an ingredient in the product for 20 years without causing any problems, Gates said. In fact, the few people who notice it generally find it charming — and he can’t imagine any sane person ever being confused by it.

“Anybody who reads ‘love’ on there and thinks it’s endangering their health has bigger problems,” he said.

Still, he insists, love is an essential ingredient.

“You can give someone a recipe for making the kind of things we make here and they might follow it to a T and still get it wrong,” he said. “If you don’t care, if you don’t do it with passion, if you don’t mix love into it, you can’t be sure of the result.”

The whimsical ingredient was far from the FDA’s biggest worry, the agency told Bloomberg News. It was more concerned about a smorgasbord of sanitary issues also outlined in the letter, which included a “lone crawling insect” near some focaccia.

“The agency expects the company to correct the serious violations found on FDA’s inspection, as noted in the warning letter,” it said in a statement.

Nashoba Brook plans on rectifying all of those problems, Gates said — but will send a polite letter to the FDA asking it to give “love” a chance.

“We’ll ask for consideration and see if we can keep it,” he said.