back to menuThe meeting was chaired by Baroness Hayman who described herself as "the Food Standards Minister". Among the Panel Members present were Sue Payne, Phyl Sluce and Dorothy Craig, all NfCG Members. In the audience were NfCG Vice President Tom Miller, Mrs Heron from Exeter Group and myself as Editor. Jill Wordley and Geoffrey Podger were in attendance with several other high powered MAFF people. The room was full with about sixty people eagerly awaiting the committee’s deliberations.
May Kidd, a farmer herself, had asked members of the Scottish Consumer Council Consumer Network what three issues gave them most concern about food safety, and why? Half of them said "Food Hygiene Standards, both of food suppliers such as shops and restaurants, and in the home". GM foods concerned 40% of the respondents. It was lack of knowledge that caused ‘most concern. The same number were concerned about Chemicals, Pesticides and Additives. There were a number of other concerns. BSE was quite low down the list.
Discussion took place about education in food hygiene/handling, or rather lack of it, in schools. The Food Standards Agency was urged to make food hygiene its top launch priority. The Consumer Panel should talk to the Dept. of Education about its concerns. It turned out they did - frequently.
Nobody was able to explain satisfactorily why supermarkets had not followed the well established colour coding of the doorstep delivery dairies. One explanation (from Somerfield) was that it was impossible to print gold on cartons. An illustration of the sort of problems that arise -green coded doorstep milk is unpasteurised, but in supermarkets green signifies semi-skimmed milk. Confusion could be serious for some people.
A MAFF official gave the figure for delivered milk as 30% of the market and declining. This was bad news for those housebound or too busy to shop. There was discussion about the keeping qualities of supermarket milk compared with delivered. Usually the supermarket variety keeps longer, one reason for buying it. It is also cheaper.
Mrs Heron told about Exeter Group’s campaign to get supermarkets to adopt a standard system, and Plymouth Group’s similar efforts were also mentioned. They were both eventually successful!
Ideas about date-stamping bottle tops were discussed. There were considerable difficulties. Dorothy Craig complained that colour coded milk was no help to someone who was colour blind.
The meeting agreed that all was not lost and an approach should be made to try to get the supermarkets to adopt the system used by the National Dairymen’s Association, or at least talk to them about it.
MAFF had submitted a Paper which did not try to hide how serious the problem had been, and showed that it was still with us though in diminishing frequency. Dr. John Godfrey explained that CJD had so far only been found in people with one of three gene types. It was not known whether people with the less common genes were incubating longer or not at risk. That shows how little we know about CJD, even now.
One astonishing fact in the Paper is that the rate of Sporadic or Familial CJD in humans is the same the world over, except in New Guinea where a CJD -like disease exists and was almost certainly introduced when, early this century, cannibals ate someone who was infected.
There was much discussion about scrapie in sheep and whether there was a link with BSE in cattle. Experiments showed that sheep did not catch BSE even when exposed to all the usual causes. There were about 400 cases of scrapie a year and there were several strains. Some sheep, because of their genetic make-up, are resistant to some strains.
The scientific facts about BSE are well established but there are different opinions among experts about what to do now. Incidents are gradually falling away to nothing, or almost nothing.
Everyone seemed pleased with the meeting and it was agreed to hold another one next year. It may be under the aegis of the FSA. The question of better co-operation was raised.
Two NfCG Consumer Groups had investigated the marking of milk and if Jacquie Salfield, who wrote the paper about colour coding of milk, had known about their findings she might have been able to save herself some of her own investigating. After the meeting Sue Payne explained that the other members did not know she was going to prepare her paper, so could not advise or help her.
back to menu