The United States Food and Drug Administration issued a regulation on Thursday ending the use of the word “midget” to describe raisins because the word “midget” is offensive to short people.
The Agricultural Marketing Service’s proposed rule would eliminate all five instances of the word from the U.S. “Standards for Grades of Processed Raisins” — where it’s been used to describe the different sizes of California raisins for quite some time — and replace them with the word “small” instead, according to an article in the Washington Free Beacon.
The request is in response to a complaint from the short-stature advocacy group Little People of America.
“On May 13, 2013, AMS received a petition from the Little People of America stating that they ‘are trying to raise awareness around and eliminate the use of the word midget,’” the USDA said, according to the Free Beacon.
#related#“The petition further stated that, ‘Though the use of the word midget by the USDA when classifying certain food products is benign, Little People of America, and the dwarfism community, hopes that the USDA would consider phasing out the term midget,” it continued.
(Why any civilian would have been sitting around reading the “Standards for Grades of Processed Raisins” for long enough to notice something like this in the first place is not clear.)
The Free Beacon reports that the USDA’s Raisin Administrative Committee — yes, that’s a thing — “approved the removal of the term midget from the standards” in 2014.
Sounds like it’s been a hell of a process to get this all done. But that’s okay. This is, after all, a very important issue.