The back of the pack

On a supermarket shelf in Manama, a jar of pickles shows a smiling grandmother, a village at sunrise and the words made the old way.

Nobody holding that jar believes the grandmother is real. That is fine. The front of a pack is a stage. It is allowed to perform, the way an advert is, the way a host says the meal was no trouble at all. Shoppers know the rules, and nobody feels lied to by a drawing.

Turn the jar over and the rules change. The weight, the ingredients, the date, the country it was packed in. Here nobody is expecting a performance. A parent checking for nuts, a man watching his salt, a woman who needs the date to be real: they are relying on that small grey panel to say true things, plainly, every time.

The damage starts when the performance creeps round the back. A weight that quietly includes the brine. An ingredient listed under a name nobody recognises. A claim on the side that is technically defensible and practically false. Each one earns a little, because most people will not check, and the few who do will not be heard.

But the back of the pack only works because people trust it without checking. That trust was built slowly, by a great many honest labels, and it is spent quickly. Once shoppers learn that the grey panel also plays a role, they stop reading it, and then nothing on the jar is worth reading at all.

Some places are for performing and some are for telling the truth. Moving the act into the second kind pays well for a while, and leaves everyone with less to stand on.