Just something I thought of from the Column here:
Cecil concludes in this article that the name “Grape-Nuts” is a “fanciful” name and doesn’t explicitly call itself Grape Nuts.
Ok, I can see that.
However, Cecil told Winfield S. of Chicago that his idea of “100% Lean Beef brand desiccated corn husks” would be shot down by the FTC for “tendency to deceive”. Along the same “fanciful” lines, couldn’t Winfield rename his product to “100% Lean-Beef brand desiccated corn husks” and be fine?
According to the logic of this post, that would make sense… let me peruse the article more before committing to that side of the argument. (I will gladly take a seat on the fence while I do said perusing.)
I was about to post this very idea. I was going to title it something like “Can I sell the corn husks if I hyphenate Lean-Beef?”
Great minds think alike!
I guess the question is what is a “Grape Nut” anyway? Do the grapes speak in high pitched voices after grape nuts are collected from the fields?
There was a case not too long ago about a woman suing Cap’n Crunch with Crunch Berries because the cereal contained no actual berries. The court ruled that there was no such thing as a “crunch berry”. Besides, you could look at the box and see that the berries in the picture weren’t real berries.
Grape Nuts is a rather old brand and predates both the FTC and the FDA. It might have simply gotten a pass because it was a well established brand although both of these agencies did go after Coca Cola for both containing and not containing cocaine. (The FDA went after Coca Cola for the deactivated cocaine that it contained, and the FTC went after Coca Cola because it didn’t contain cocaine nor kola nuts – the two ingredients it was named after.)
Besides, which is more deceptive: A cereal like Grape Nuts that’s actually made from real ingredients, or a cereal like Trix claiming that it is made from whole grains (which was the third ingredient after regular corn flour and high fructose corn syrup).
Wow, thanks for the replies! It was odd because he seemed to be contradicting himself a bit (Yeah, yeah, I know Cecil is never wrong 
).
I’m glad that some agree with me on this! I do believe, though, that Qazwart speaks the truth. Grape-Nuts predates that FTC and the FDA, so I’m assuming that it was allowed to pass through on that fact.
Haha, nice DavidM. Indeed, great minds think alike!
You know, that all-important hyphen gets pretty vestigial sometimes. Are these people deliberately mocking the law?
That was the sixties, when people thought that man-made ingredients were technologically advanced and therefore better. So they wouldn’t have worried much about Grape-Nuts or sugar or fast food or any of the many things that websites say are killing me from the inside.
I looked at older advertisements from the Thirties to the Fifties to see if they played a similar trick as your example. What I found most often is that the division was prominently displayed but instead of a hyphen, there was an equals sign. Grape=Nuts. I don’t know how to interpret that equation, but it seems nonsensical enough that folks would realize Grape Nuts don’t exist.
Strawberries are not botanically berries either. Nearest I can imagine natural that grapenuts might represent are grape seeds - both perfectly vile in any case. I don’t think the 60s were really so in love with artificiality. I think they were the first move away from it to more natural and relaxed attitudes and got well and truly smashed ahead of their time. Even now we have not recovered from the Great Leap Backwards from 1980.
Thank you! I signed up to this forum just so I could comment on this article about this. Call me OCD, but this just has been gnawing at me–I’ve been under the impression since I was a child–when we learn nearly everything from association and context, so maybe this is just me projecting a long held assumption–that it was just another fact of life that grape-nuts cereal were called so because they identically resemble the “nuts” (or seeds) inside of a grape–specifically the larger variety, such as concord grapes.
Then I realized just how few people have probably encountered a seeded grape since the seedless variety are so convenient and popular at chain groceries nowadays. But if you ever buy your grapes from a farmer’s market or other small grocery (and like most everything in the world, it does taste so much better down at the farm), you’re likely to crack a tooth on the seed and curse bitterly.
Or maybe that’s just me But even so, if you ever buy concord grapes, even from the grocery, they’re likely to have seeds (in my experience), tiny ones in the exact same shape, size and tooth-cracking density as the granules of grape-nuts cereal, which I had to for breakfast this morning, incidentally.
Happy munching
I think the main point of the arguement is “intent to mislead” or “likely to mislead”.
The average reasonable person knows there are nothing like grape-nuts or nuts from grapes in real life. Calling a corn-husk product “beef” for no logical reason seems more intended to trick the buyer into thinking that meat is somehow contained in this product.
As a counter-example - consider “Goldfish” made out of dough and seasoning. Nobody is likely to reasonably believe that goldfish is a significant ingredient or any part of a cracker that is simply shaped and colored like a goldfish. Nobody would say, “ooo,must contain that healthy fish-oil stufff”. Hence, no intentional or convenient misleading, not problem with name.
As for berries - I guess if it is flavoured to taste like berries but contains no actual berry material, what would the rule be? I assume if the phrase “berry flavoured” is sufficiently prominent that a reasonable person would see that there is no actual jam in the product, then OK. I suppose Grape-Nuts is lucky to be established before the government got really picky. I could see the “it has nothing to do with grapes or nuts” argument working today if it weren’t an already established brand.
But then again, I suspect nuts and honey are very minor ingredients in Nut’n’Honey cereal. (But at least they’re there.)
