Food: Regulation and Guidance

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Thursday 7th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

First, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, for giving us the opportunity, which we rarely have in this House, to discuss food nutrition. When these issues are so central to our lives for both our health and social well-being, it is remarkable how seldom we debate them.

It also gives me great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Rea, who, as chairman of the Associate Parliamentary Food and Health Forum, has provided a wonderful opportunity for those of us who belong to it—I declare an interest as an officer—to attend the seminars that it lays on, many of which have covered subjects that have been touched on today, such as trans fats, salts in food, and in utero nourishment. I have learnt a tremendous amount from the forum. The secretary, Patricia Constant, now produces a very helpful round-up of everything that has happened called “Food in Parliament”, which makes it much easier to see who is asking about what and who is not asking anything at all, which is also very interesting. Therefore, I express great gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Rea, for all the work that he has put into the forum. It has made a huge difference to parliamentarians’ understanding of these issues.

I was very struck by the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, saying that we should not consider this matter simply by itself but that it is part of a much larger issue, which of course it is. Noble Lords who are here to debate the millennium development goals shortly could equally well have taken part in this debate, or vice versa, because 1 billion people in the world still suffer from chronic hunger. Even if millennium development goal No. 1 is reached by 2015, half a billion people will still suffer from chronic hunger. That is not to say that people suffering from malnutrition in this country have any less of a problem—it is all part of the same problem, and I shall give noble Lords one example.

The fact that there are so many quite obese people is partly due to the fast food industry and Big Macs and so on, because a lot of very fatty cheap meat was heavily promoted. Of course, the cost of that very cheap meat has been borne in countries where grain and soya prices have gone up. Grain and soya is fed to the cattle to provide the western world with the very cheap meat, which is ruining our health, and there is therefore a vicious circle. It is vicious for us for all the reasons that we have heard today, and it is vicious for those still suffering from chronic hunger, so I do not think that we can afford to take this matter lightly. We need to start taking a tougher line with the food industry, and I am glad that some noble Lords have said that today.

The FSA has done some good work, which I shall refer to in a moment, but I think that it lacks the necessary teeth in the face of the strength of the food lobby. It is therefore time for a new look at the FSA. Establishing the agency was an attempt to bring policy together, but the question of nutrition was fudged at the outset. The FSA was never given a strong enough remit to take on nutrition. It picked up the reins as best it could but nutrition was never in its original remit and so the agency was always on the back foot, reacting to the next food industry initiative.

For an example of how seriously the Government will need to take this issue we need only look at the excellent debate in this House on 13 July this year on nanotechnologies and food. The committee looking into this, under the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, who knows a great deal about food regulation, having been in charge at the outset of the FSA, highlighted a huge number of points that I could not hope to reiterate this afternoon. However, I draw attention to the sort of danger that the noble Lord sees. He said:

“First, by keeping quiet about nanotechnologies, the food industry leaves a communication vacuum into which pressure groups and/or inaccurate media reporting will happily step. Secondly, in contrast to what was said about GM products in the 1990s, there are real potential consumer benefits to be had from nanotechnologies”.—[Official Report, 13/7/10; col. 656.]

There is a need for a strong regulator to be able to rely on some very well researched issues as this is an extremely fast-moving field. Let us consider what nanotechnologies can do to food. For example, we could be offered ice-cream that will look like ice-cream and taste like ice-cream but will not be ice-cream. That might be good in that it will not fatten you, but it might be extremely dangerous in the sense that it would not contain any of the benefits of a dairy product that we have come to know. I know that the Minister said when replying to that debate that he foresaw a robust regulatory function that would still continue to be delivered through the agency, but he admitted that it was a fast moving picture. He went on to say that,

“the FSA could more sensibly and cost-effectively sit elsewhere”.—[Official Report, 13/7/10; col. 671.]

I do not take issue with that. Like other noble Lords, I want Ministers to be more accountable for some of the issues, but I hope that “cost-effectively” is not shorthand for saying that the nutritional element will completely disappear from the horizon. As has been highlighted this afternoon, it is incredibly important.

I join other noble Lords for whom nutrition begins before the baby is born by saying that we still ignore the diets of pregnant women too much. It is incredibly striking how brains develop during pregnancy and not thereafter, so I make a plea for the nutrition of pregnant women and breast-feeding to be particularly concentrated on. Only last week, yet more research showed that babies who had been breast-fed for up to six months had much better health outcomes in a large number of ways. Indeed, the NHS’s own figures show that 84 per cent of women know that breast-feeding is particularly good for the health of their babies, yet the figures still drop off dramatically a month after the baby is born. It is a cultural issue as much as anything. It is very difficult to get people to go back to providing for breast-feeding or encouraging it in the workplace and elsewhere. It is no more acceptable in pubs and restaurants than it was when I was a young mother. That is a pretty sad state of affairs considering that that was about 30 years ago.

Finally, I shall mention the Tudge principle which we have adopted in our house. It comes from an author called Colin Tudge, whom I have had the privilege to meet a couple of times. He has written a number of books on food and has done a great deal of work in this area throughout his life. Among his books, he has written So Shall We Reap and Feeding People is Easy. Primarily, his contention is that if we look at some of the places in the world that we consider to have terrific cuisine, such as the south of France, and the places that we go to to enjoy the sort of diet that they have, we see that they eat very little meat and a lot of vegetables, rice and other things.

It is going to be hard to get back to that sort of principle in the face of the biggest added value for the industry always being meat, but it is important in dietary terms and incredibly important environmentally. The UN’s most recent report on agro-ecology shows that, in climate change and sustainability terms, it will not be possible to continue with current meat consumption in either the western world or the countries that are now aspiring to join it. We all have to change our thinking and go back to meat being a small part of our diet. For example, in a risotto, there might be a few pieces of meat. A chicken is for high days and holidays. Yes, it will be hard for our generation and probably for our children, who have grown up with eating meat, but it is a matter of taste. That is where we come back to school meals. We educate our children's palates when they are very little, and it is very hard to get over that. That is why, when people are ill or far from home, they crave the things that they had when they were little. I hope that the Minister will be able to comment on what will happen with the future regulation of school food, because we need to get into schools to educate the children's palates for the future. It is no good regulating people when they are adults; that is too late.