The National Farmers’ Union and actionaid have joined forces to place a full-page ad in The Times, calling for a supermarket watchdog. The Competition Commission suggested a watchdog as a remedy to problems identified in its investigation of the UK grocery market, a proposal welcomed by farmers and other supermarket suppliers, but starkly opposed by most large retailers.
Every day, the world’s food system has 6.5 billion mouths to feed. It’s humanity’s single biggest undertaking: 1.3 billion farm-workers work 4.9 billion HA to produce 356 kg of grain each year for every person alive. Still the system isn’t working: “2 billion people suffer from chronic under-nutrition and 18 million die each year from hunger-related diseases”. Understanding the world’s food system better is essential if we’re to face move towards a more equitable and sustainable way of feeding ourselves. Tim Lang and Erik Millstone’s updated edition of The Atlas of Food in an invaluable guide to the complexities and scale of world food.
Parents seeking to follow the Food Standards Agency’s advice to avoid products with the Southampton additives need to watch out for medicines as well as the more usual suspects of confectionery, soft drinks and other foods.
Professor Tim Lang identifies the ten “new fundamentals” for 21st century food policy: oil and energy, water, climate change, biodiversity, demographics, urbanisation, labour, nutrition transition, health care costs, battles of power and price volatility.
Since the Food Standards Agency advised parents of children with hyperactivity to avoid certain colour additives in food, it has kept a partial list of products declared free of the offending additives. But which products contain the colours associated with child hyperactivity? Unfortunately, hundreds still do. Action on Additives provides a useful database of products but searching ingredient lists identifies many more still.
Mammalian excreta, rodent filth, insect filth, mould, rot, insects, larvae, mites, insect eggs, sand and grit, mildew, parasites: an unappetising list, but the US Food and Drug Administration publishes a useful handbook detailing the acceptable amounts of such contaminants in a range of foods.
US consumers are told to expect to find up to 60 aphids / thrips / mites in every 100g of frozen broccoli (but only up to 30 in frozen Brussels sprouts), up to 60 insect fragments in a 100g chocolate bar, up to 4 rodent hairs in 25g of curry powder, and a “copepod accompanied by pus pockets” in 3% of their red fish fillets. These are the specified action levels, below which there is “no inherent hazard to health”.
The Conservative Party launches a campaign for honest food, demanding that food labelled “British” should be born and bred in Britain. It’s hard to argue with but sadly often not the case in Britain today.
Charting the striking changes in when we eat between 1961 and 2001
The UK government is at last waking from its long complacent slumbers and asking serious questions about food security. After enjoying an abundant supply of ever cheaper food for the last five decades, the developed world is beginning to realise that we can’t take the essentials of life for granted indefinitely.
Food Matters, the new Cabinet Office report on food policy
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