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Additives: Look Before You Eat
Part 1: Introduction
Food is an important part of a balanced diet.
Fran Lebowitz
Everything that exists is a chemical.
All foods are chemicals.
All foods are safe.
Food additives are chemicals.
Therefore, all additives are safe.
Popular myth
You walk into a supermarket. On the delicatessen counter there are some
sausages whose label reads: 'not
less than 100% meat'; in other words, there is nothing in them other than meat.
But it also reads:
'contains herbs, preservative and colour' so, quite obviously,
it must be less than 100% meat
. It works
like this. Say you have 5 lbs of raw meat, but after cooking it, its weight has
dropped to 4 lbs. The law
allows you to make up that other lb. with a cheap filler. You now have 5 lbs
of the mixture and,
because it weighs the same as the original meat, you can call it 100% meat!
Asking my butcher the same question elicited a different answer.
He told me
that it did not mean that the whole product is 100% meat, merely that the meat
that is in it is 100% meat. My local Trading Standards Department confirmed
that the supermarket manager's answer was the correct one. These two answers
show that even the trade is not sure what the law means. But either way, it is
a fraud — and it's legal.
Once upon a time, most of the population lived close to the land.
They either had a few poultry or a pig
and grew their own food, or they bought it from a neighbour whom they knew.
Then came the shift from
the land to living in towns and food for the urban populations was brought in
from specialist businesses.
The consumer didn't know the producer, and if there was a choice, he tended to
buy the cheaper product.
Producers, to compete, had to find ways to cut costs; but unscrupulous ones had
already found ways to
reduce costs to enhance their profit margins. To reduce the production costs of
a loaf of bread, bakers
fraudulently added such things as chalk, sawdust, and pipe clay. Used
tea-leaves were collected from
hotels, taken to factories and 'recycled'. The once-used leaves were dried
carefully with other dried leaves
from the hedgerows added, and then coloured with anything which came to hand so
that they looked new.
From staples such as bread, cheese and beer, to the more upmarket wines and
coffee, all were adulterated.
The situation became so bad that it became almost impossible to buy real, pure
food. The populations of
the towns were so far removed from the producers that they could do nothing
about it.
In 1820 an analytical chemist, Frederick Accum, wrote a book which
became a best-seller. Entitled
Treatise on the Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons
, and with the skull and crossbones on the
cover, the book told of the widespread fraud in food manufacture. It heralded
the start of a campaign by
Accum, together with the editor of the
Lancet
, Thomas Wakley and a number of others, which went on
for over half a century, in an attempt to get government to legislate against
such fraud.
Governments dithered while the manufacturers claimed that what
they put in their products enhanced the
taste or made it last longer or that was the way the public liked it or if they
didn't, it would have to be too
expensive for people to buy. But Accum and his fellow campaigners won finally
when legislation was
enacted in 1875 in the form of the Sale of Food and Drugs Act which made it
illegal to sell food which
was not 'of the nature, substance or quality of the article demanded'. Based on
the 1875 act, the 1984 the
Food Act added strength to it by making it an offence to 'add any substance to
food, use any substance
as an ingredient in the preparation of food, abstract any constituent from
food, or subject food to any other
process or treatment, so as to render the food injurious to health'.
Manufacturers and retailers had to
comply with the Trades Descriptions Act food labelling regulations and it was
an offence to sell any food
which was not of the nature, substance or quality demanded.
Unfortunately compositional standards and minimum meat contents
regulations for a large range of meat
products were removed at the same time. Despite improvements in labelling,
Trading Standards Officers
found that the meat content of 22 products had dropped dramatically from an
average of forty-six percent
to thiry-one. One chicken in gravy product fell from a fairly respectable
seventy-five percent meat, to only
forty-five percent meat.
In 1990 a new Food Safety Act (FSA) became law, revoking certain
aspects of the 1984 Act. It was an
important statement of government policy and was billed as the answer to the
problems which have been
discussed. This Act, which is criminal rather than civil law, covers fair
trading as well as safety. Under
the FSA, food has to be what YOU, the consumer, expect and want it to be. In
line with the 1875 act, it
is an offence to sell 'any food which is not of the nature or substance or
quality demanded'. (Sect.14).
It is also an offence to give a false or misleading description of a food on
labels or advertising (Sect 15).
If food is 'injurious to health', it is an offence under Sect. 7, and the
responsibility for safety is put on
the producer or seller in a new 'due diligence' clause (Sect.21). This means
that they have to show that
they did everything in their power to ensure that a food was alright; and that
if something went wrong,
it was outside their control. This due diligence clause was potentially good
news for consumers as it
should have encouraged food traders to review their standards and improve them,
particularly as both
producers and sellers of food have to ensure not only that food is safe in the
short-term but also in the
long-term (Sect. 7.2). Consumers can use this against producers of products
with known long-term health
problems.
Last updated 17 September 2007
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