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What is RSS?Friday 26 January 2007
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Are we about to experience a revolution in our food culture? Are consumers suspicious of 'hidden, mysterious additives' in food? Is organic food actually more unhealthy than conventional food? Are people buying organic because of a giant 'con-trick'? These were some of the key issues raised at this year's City Food Lecture, sponsored by the Agency.
Agency Chief Scientist Dr Andrew Wadge talks about the City Food Lecture in his blog posting on organics. Although the event is now over, you can join in the ongoing debate at (External) food.gov.uk/scienceblog .
Guildhall, in the City of London, was packed to its medieval rafters for the event, held on 23 January, with an audience of more than 600 people hanging on every word of the lecture and participating in the question and answer session that followed.
The lecture, entitled: ' Food and values - the organic future ', was given by Peter Melchett, Policy Director of the Soil Association, and the event was chaired by Food Standards Agency Chair Deirdre Hutton.
Every organisation with an interest in food seemed to be represented in the hall, from high street retailers, food producers, scientists and nutritionists to consumer organisations, pressure groups, farmers and academic bodies.
And, as hosts for the evening, the City Livery Companies were in attendance, including the companies of farmers, cooks and poulters, fishmongers and fruiterers, and butchers and bakers (if not candlestick makers).
To leaven the debate with some controversy during a following question and answer session the FSA had assembled a tasty panel of experts: Prue Leith, Tim Lang, Sir Stuart Hampson and Tim Smith.
Tim Lang is Professor of Food Policy at City University, London; Prue Leith, best known as a caterer and restaurateur, is now Chair of the School Food Trust; Sir Stuart Hampson is Chair of the John Lewis Partnership, which includes Waitrose, and Tim Smith Chief Executive of Arla Foods UK plc, the UK's leading dairy processing company.
The Guildhall, with its flags, heraldic shields and stained glass windows, had maybe never experienced anything like it. Large video display screens at the sides and front of the hall enabled the packed audience to see the lecture, and people with microphones were on hand to enable anyone with a question to participate.
And in the shadows created by the television spotlights it looked as if the gargoyles and griffins adorning the walls were gazing intently at the speakers, even the Duke of Wellington, whose statue was overlooking the audience, seemed to be trying to catch the Chair's eye during the debate.
In his speech, Lord Melchett said that: 'We're at the beginning of major changes in our food culture which will, in turn, lead to profound changes in British farming.'
Research has shown that people have a deep underlying unease about modern farming and food processing, he said. 'People are suspicious because they feel that much of what is done in producing our food, their food, is done in secret, from the dark interior of the battery house through hidden or mysterious additives to misleading packaging. People aren't stupid.'
Over the past decade there's been a huge shift in UK public policy on food and farming, he said. 'The post-war policy of cheap and plentiful food has landed us with a cheap and unhealthy diet, and a crisis of obesity and ill health.
'Real changes are taking place in our food culture, and these are increasingly reflected in the marketplace. While people still largely buy on price, they actually value the quality and taste of food above price.
'The rise in retail sales of organic have hit the headlines, but the growth in local and direct sales of organic food are more dramatic and may be more significant in the long run.
'The FSA is responding to this value shift by committing to integrate sustainability advice with the nutritional advice it gives to the public, and I welcome this.'
It was wrong to assume that opposition to pesticides, routine use of antibiotics, or to GM, 'reflects any sort of opposition to science', he added.
'I think this new phase in our food culture will be informed by public experience, particularly of the mistakes we've made over the last half century. Those mistakes include sudden and unexpected outbreaks of disease, like mad cow disease, as well as the slow discovery of long term but dramatic changes like the decline in farmland birds and other wildlife, or the decline in the vitamin and nutrient content of our food.
'Second, this new phase will be informed by the changes in public values I've already discussed.
'Third, it will be informed by science and particularly by the need to respond to the science of climate change.
'If we move towards fresh, wholesome food and tackle climate change, then it's clear what direction food and farming must take. The future of UK food is seasonal, fresh and local, produced by organic farms to minimise greenhouse gas emissions.
'We are seeing the start of a revolution in our food culture, and farming practice. We don't need to wait for governments or companies, to make these changes. All of us decide what we eat, so all of us can make a difference.'
A full version of Peter Melchett's speech, ' Food and values - the organic future ', is available on this website.
Panellist Prue Leith said, however, that she was unconvinced by the arguments that organic food was either nutritionally better or that it tastes better.
'Organic food may well taste better, simply because from plough to plate is a shorter distance. If you pull a carrot straight out of the ground, it does taste very different from if you get a carrot five days later, or ten days later.'
She added that: 'If you're poor, and you can't afford [organic food], and you don't know how to cook, you are almost forced into eating pot noodles and junk.'
Tim Lang felt the evidence about organics is much stronger on the environmental and sustainability issues than it is on the public health issues. He said: 'When I turn to organics, I see organics actually selling an awful lot of fats, and I would like to see organics making a commitment to really address the public health agenda. You can actually make a commitment, as a movement, to reduce your production of fat.'
He added that there was 'a very hard issue for public policy here, which is, 'are we going to be upfront, and say to poor people, who for 60 years have been told the joy of food policy is to lower prices, that actually we're now going to raise them?'
Speaking from the audience, Geoffrey Hollis, a former civil servant in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, said: the reason that people buy organic food is that they have been persuaded of benefits that don't exist, chiefly by the supermarkets. 'Consumers are buying organic food on a false premise and, in my view, it's more akin to a confidence trick.'
Professor MacGregor, from St George's Hospital, in London, said: 'Most members of the public think that organic food is more healthy, and yet there is not a scrap of evidence to suggest that's true. What kills us in fact in the UK is strokes, heart attacks and cancer, and they are largely due to eating too many calories, too much fat, too little fruit and vegetables and too much salt. In surveys we've done of organic food - for like for like products - there's just as much salt if not more salt in those products and often more saturated fat.'
Panellist Tim Smith said: 'When we talk to consumers [who are coming out of retailers or whilst they are doing their shopping], about the fat component of milk or any other particularly nutritional component of milk, there is a woeful lack of knowledge about what whole milk constitutes, what semi-skimmed milk's all about and what skimmed milk is, and I come back to one of my favourite themes, which is that we in this country are doing a terrible job of educating our youngsters in the nutritional components of the diet.
'We're not teaching them to cook. We're not teaching them what actually goes into the foods that they're consuming, and until we do that, all the labelling that we're going to do is just patching up a very nasty wound.'
Guy Smith, a non-organic farmer speaking from the audience expressed concern at the possibility that if subjective consumer concerns were to be taken into account unduly when considering food safety.He asked: 'Where is the Food Standards Agency going to go if science is not going to be the only arbiter?'
FSA: continuing to base its policy on science
In response, FSA Chair Deirdre Hutton emphasised that the Agency would 'continue as always to base what we do on good science and we are very well equipped to do that.
Panellist Sir Stuart Hampson touched on the issue of how retailers and food producers could work together to ensure food values are given as much emphasis as profits. He said: 'If a buyer gets rewarded by his gross margin - how much money he can make for the company - then he'll be out to give [the producer] a low price.
'If the buyer is motivated and rewarded on the basis of building the business in the long term, it'll be very different. Those questions of motivation go to the heart of the morality and the approach of retailers.
'I am very much in favour of the words 'fair trade', not only applying to developed countries, but fair trade applying to British farmers as well.'
Later in the discussion, Tom Copas, from the Worshipful Company of Farmers, said however, that the organic movement had taught farmers one thing - 'that there are people who will pay more for food.'
He said that he had this year produced a small crop of turkeys - organic turkeys - and was able to sell them 'for a lot more money'. The fact is, he said, 'there are certain' customers , who will buy the most expensive - because it's the most expensive. And that's what they've achieved, well done.'
From the audience, farmer John De Ramsey said that 'cynical slagging off of GM technology by [the Soil Association] is more a marketing ploy for organic than it is criticising GM technology. The future of subsistence sub-Saharan farmers and the well-being of their communities will include - it won't rely on totally - but it will include GM technology.'
Prue Leith did feel there was some cause for optimism. 'What the Government has done in this latest round of regulations about school dinners is to change what will be taught in food technology in the future. You won't be able to get away with doing a food technology course on the computer. You'll have to do it with physical cooking. And it is now going to be right of every child to learn to cook and the school must deliver that.'
Efforts needed across schools
But schools will never get children to eat well 'unless they are enthusiastic about food and they know a lot about it, which means that science teachers, geography teachers, maths teachers, everybody, should be using food in a cross curricular way, so the children learn about food miles, learn about the environment, learn about diet and nutrition in their school life, as well as dinner ladies encouraging them to cook the right things and cooks being taught to cook well.
'It does have to be an absolutely cross-school business, otherwise the children don't like it, the teachers don't see the point in it, the parents put burgers through the bars of the school gates, and the children won't eat it.'
Tim Lang added that: 'The evidence shows that we learn to cook at three stages of our life. One is with our mothers - plain fairy cakes - or grannies. The second is at school - and school was taken out, and the fight over the last 20 years is to get it back in.
'But the third phase no-one talks about at all, which is when people leave home. In my university up the road, City University, we want to do a system where every person who comes to City University gets a teaching pack. We must use that moment when they start cooking for themselves to help them switch from sludge to real food.'
Deirdre Hutton interjected from the Chair to point out that he would be glad to know that 'the Foods Standards Agency's launched a programme precisely like that in universities in Northern Ireland.'
Tim Lang suggested that there was no room for complacency over the intake of fruit and vegetables and the 5-a-day campaign. 'We need to double the intake of fruit and vegetables in this country as a population, and that's even going for the pathetic - I shouldn't say this, Deirdre - five a day.
'If it was nine a day, if you have nine portions of fruit and vegetables a day, you're so full you haven't got room to eat the fat. And that's the sort of commonsense public health approach we want (and you don't have the salt either).'
Drawing the discussion to a close, Deirdre Hutton said that the discussion had raised 'many difficult, ethical, troubling, challenging questions, and I think that tonight's lecture and the panel discussion has absolutely brought that to the fore.
'There are some very significant causes potentially for concern about what our food does to us, or doesn't do to us, and what it does or doesn't do to the planet,' she said. 'But I think there also is - and perhaps just because I'm a born optimist - I think there is also some cause for optimism as we've been hearing.'
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