In a previous post, I poked a little fun at the Nutrition Facts label on food items. Let’s face it, the incomprehensible arrangement of calories and percentages of daily allowances based on your daily caloric intake (without any guidance whatsoever as to what your daily caloric intake ought to be) make nutrition labeling much less useful and practical than it should be.

Well, someone over at the FDA must be reading Fifty-Something Women because they have just developed an online interactive game to teach consumers how to read the nutrition label. The program, called Make Your Calories Count, features a character called Labelman (I swear I am not making this up). Labelman will lead you through the murky waters of nutrition labeling, explaining portion sizes and servings per container.

Actually serving size and servings per container are the pivotal bits of information on any nutrition label and the manufacturers use them to their advantage quite well. No one wants to look at a bag of chips they are about to consume and read that it contains 1140 calories! So the manufacturer will put on the label that a one-ounce serving contains 190 calories. Well, that doesn’t sound too bad for a snack. It’s probably not bad. It gets bad when you eat the whole bag which is actually six one-ounce servings.

Make Your Calories Count looks slightly amateurish and a bit like one of those overhead projector slide show presentations at some pyramid scheme motivational meeting. There are a few beeps and pings as Labelman slaps his pointer at the label facts and then exits, stage left.

Go see our tax dollars at work at Make Your Calories Count

There was a time when domestic wines were not so highly regarded and an “imported” wine usually meant French or German. Nowadays it is just as likely to mean wine from Australia or South Africa.

And the same is happening in Europe where winemakers in EU countries are losing customers to wines imported from Australia, South Africa and the US. The blame is being put on the intricate and detailed labelling of wines, which can be confusing to consumers.

“The consumer decides what is taken down the shelves in the supermarkets. The consumer wants simple, clear labeling,” EU Farm Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel said after meeting with farm ministers from the 25 EU member nations to discuss reforming Europe’s wine sector.

“When you look at the success of the new-world wines, some of them specifically use the labeling ‘Chardonnay,’ ‘Sauvignon,’ and people don’t ask for anything, but ‘let me get a glass or a bottle of Sauvignon,” she said.

Clear simple labeling? You have to be a nutrition expert to figure out how many cookies you can eat.