Zero means zero

If I ever apply for a job in the food industry, I am going to list my GPA as a 4.0 on my resume. If they are allowed to round down .5 grams or less of trans fats and claim "zero" transfats, then conversely, I should be able to round up my GPA.

So why is zero no longer zero? When I was growing up, zero meant zero. Nothing. Nada. Rien. However, in this postmodern world of the twenty-first century, zero sometimes isn't zero.

For example, let's take Banana Republic. They have a size 0. How can 0 be a size? I thought zero meant nothing. Granted, a size 0 is so tiny that it is almost nothing, but "almost nothing" is not the same thing as nothing. Am I the only one that has conceptual issues with a size 0?

But my biggest contention with zero abuse is with the food industry and how they label the transfat content of foods. For example, take girl scout cookies. Not to bash something that is for a good cause, but I have been on a vigorous campaign to cut transfats out of my diet, so this means a near obsessive reading of food labels. Several of the girl scout cookies list partially-hydrogenated oils as the second ingredient, and yet, the transfat listing is zero.

This is not possible, since partially hydrogenated oils are transfats. Subsequently, I have seen many foods that list partially hydrogenated oils as an ingredient but also claim that the transfat content is zero.

I was very suspicious of this mathematical anomaly, so looked into it. It turns out that if the transfat content is less than .5 g, they can list it as zero.

Perhaps this is why Americans can't do math--because the food industry is telling us that 0.5=0.

But again, my contention-- "less than 0.5 grams" is not the same as zero, which means nothing. If you multiply nothing by 100, you get nothing. However, if you multipy 0.49999 grams of transfats by 100 servings, that's 49.9 grams of transfats. 49.9999 does not equal 0, so by a simple law of algebra, 0.5 doesn't equal 0.

If a food label says there are zero grams of transfats in my thin mints, to me, that means there are no transfats in my thin mints, whether I eat just one or 100. Given that you have to buy these things by the box, it's a little misleading to label a box of cookies as having "zero transfat", when that applies (and dubiously so) to only one serving, no?

Who lets the food industry get away with this kind of number illiteracy?