The Conservative Party have today launched a campaign for “honest food“, in sympathy with growing public awareness of the misleading labels on much of our food and demand for more clarity as to how and where our food is produced. The campaign’s core message and policy is that ‘food labelled “British” should be born and bred in Britain’. It’s hard to argue with that.
Misleading labels
Hard to argue with, maybe, but sadly far from the truth in Britain today. As recent food scares, from avian flu outbreaks to the contamination with dioxins of some Irish pork, have highlighted, we can’t take it for granted that apparently British food is made from the meat of animals raised on British farms. A result of concerns about BSE in the 1990s was the introduction of compulsory origin labelling for fresh and frozen beef, but not other meat.
Legal limitations
The problem is simple: under current laws, the origin of a food product is basically the last point of processing.
Sausages can be labelled as British if the meat was made into sausages somewhere in Britain, even if that meat were from farms in Ireland, Poland or further afield. But most people, reasonably enough, understand “made in the UK” to suggest that the ingredients (at least the principal ingredients) come from UK farms.
The law, as the Food Standards Agency’s chief scientist, Andrew Wadge, recently pointed out on his instructive blog, only requires that origin be specified if consumers might otherwise be misled. His example is of packaging showing the Eiffel Tower: if the product weren’t French then this would be misleading.
The nub of the problem is the lack of precision in this requirement – what’s clear to some may still be misleading to many. An ICM opinion poll, commissioned by the Conservative Party, bears this out with the finding that 51% of consumers think a sausage “produced in the UK” contains only meat from UK farms.
The British authorities seem very generous to food manufacturers and retailers when it comes to assessing what’s misleading, while other countries are – or would like to be – more exacting.
Pictures of the Eiffel Tower are one thing, but the Spanish Government declared in 2003 that all canned asparagus should be labelled with its country of origin as consumers might reasonably expect it to be Spanish and would otherwise be misled. Significantly, the European Commission didn’t oppose this decree, though it responded negatively to an Irish proposal to extend compulsory country of origin labelling to all meat.
Gallery of shame
Tory researchers have compiled a selection of case studies (pdf) of labelling they’ve identified as misleading, from Birdseye’s “Great British Menu” chicken dinner (made in the Republic of Ireland from imported chicken) to Tesco’s bacon chops (declared “produce of Britain” though the pork could be from Holland, Denmark, Ireland or Britain). Other examples are of information that’s so vague as to be useless, such as Sainsbury’s roast chicken slices (made of “Brazilian or British chicken”).
More upmarket brands and retailers aren’t blameless either: Marks and Spencer’s “nation’s favourites” corned beef roll is emblazoned with a union jack even though the beef is from Brazil.
Strong support
The Honest Food campaign is welcome political recognition of the lack of transparency in the food system and deserves support. It already has the public backing of several celebrity chefs and food campaigners, including Prue Leith and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. More significantly, it’s won the support of farming and animal welfare organisations from Compassion in World Farming and the RSPCA to the NFU and the British Poultry Council.
Notable by their absence in the list of supporters are any food manufacturers, retailers or their representative organisations. I wonder why.
Oh, there’s a silly video clip promoting the campaign too:
