Food standardization law assumes consumers cannot read or understand labels.

Evidence

The presupposition of the statute is that the consumer either doesn’t read labels or doesn’t understand what he does read. Without this assumption the statute makes no sense. With it, all becomes meaningful. But what of the dozens of other provisions in the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act which presuppose that people do read and understand? And, if the conclusion reflected by food standardization is sound, why is it not extended to other products? Note that food standards are not primarily concerned with health and safety but with economic deception or fraud. — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process, 1567

Categorization

• QUESTION: A real puzzle: how does a statute coherently assume consumers are both incompetent (standardization) and competent (disclosure provisions) at once?
• XREF: Connects to the polyad thread on how law encodes assumptions about who the regulated subject is — parallel to Volume 1-2 interpretive material. — connects to: Forward-looking food-id standards require prior administrative rulemaking — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 1510