And and/or Or


Saw an ingredients list today that read, in part, "One or more of the following: partially hydrogenated canola oil and/or partially hydrogenated soybean oil." Leaving aside my obsessive-compulsive drive towards string compression (couldn't those two repetitions of "partially-hydrogenated" have been condensed into one?), isn't this just a bit redundant? Aren't "one or more of" and "and/or" saying basically the same thing? The only way out I can think of is that maybe "one ore more of the following" is meant to be applied to the second-order set whose elements are {canola oil}, {soybean oil}, and {canola oil, soybean oil}, so that the final result is a third-order set with elements such as {{soybean oil}} and {{canola oil}, {soybean oil, canola oil}}. Which is consistent enough from a set theory point of view, but my goodness, if the regulations defining ingredients labelling aren't first-order axiomatizable, I'm going to be very scared.