Memorandum submitted by the Trading Standards
Institute
1. NUTRITIONAL
CONTENT OF
FOOD
1.1 Trading standards is becoming more proactive
in publicising the nutritional content of foods, particularly
school meals and meals on wheels, as part of the overall health
agenda. However as Trading Standards is local authority based
any publicity tends to be mainly local, often regional (through
regional co-ordinating groups) or sometimes nationally through
the TSI. It is an area, which TSI see as an important element
to help education consumers to make informed decisions on their
diet, which will help to drive up the health of the nation.
1.2 The way forward must be through a medium
which can be understood by all, in a format which consumer will
buying in to and understand, this will require a number of different
formats, some people will be interested in a detailed programme
looking at the nutritional content of food, others will be not
so proactive in looking for the information and in many ways the
information will have to come to them in bite size pieces, simple
messages.
1.3 Of course the best way to communicate
the nutritional content of food must be at the point at which
the consumer makes the choice to buy the food, for prepacked foods
the nutritional content should be prominently displayed of the
pack, not hidden away and it should be on all foods, not just
those making a claim about being low in fat for example.
1.4 As regards food sold at catering establishments
or food sold loose, there is currently no requirement to display
the nutritional content of the food, however the consumer must
be empowered to know what is the nutritional content of foods.
To that end the nutritional content must be displayed for all
foods no matter how they are sold.
2. SAFETY OF
FOODS
2.1 Consumers do not really need to know
that food is safe to eat, as all food should be safe to eat, they
need confidence that food is safe to eat. They do, however, need
to know the cumulative effects of eating a food or a particular
ingredient, which may be in a number of different foods, eg artificial
colours. RDA's may help here.
3. MEANS OF
PRODUCTION
3.1 The means of production with the except
of fish and eggs is not communicated to consumers, there should
be no reason for this not to be indicated to the consumer, however
the consumer must be able to understand what each method really
means and the effects of that method of production.
3.2 Communicating the means of production
is relatively straight forward, however, educating consumers about
the implications of these methods is some what harder.
3.3 Approval schemes and logos can be useful
but have an unfortunate history as regards their credibility.
If such a scheme is to be used the rules must be transparent and
have consumer backing.
4. ETHNICAL CONSIDERATIONS
In this mutli-cultural society consumers will
have ethnical considerations about the foods they eat, the method
of slaughter etc, most of this information could be and often
is either labelled on the food or made know at catering outlets,
it is, however, a positive indication, only food purporting to
be Halah is labelled, consumers are often confronted by food with
no indication for which they must assume is not ethnical. This
is not particularly helpful, also, consumer who eat out may want
information on ethnic considerations before they book a table,
it is part of their considerations for choosing a restaurant for
example. May be caterers could be encouraged through a code of
practice to indicated particular ethnical concerns in any advertisement
and/or menus.
20 April 2004
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