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Jamie
Local Government
Chronicle - 09 August 2007
The Government wants our children to eat healthier food. So it unveiled, inevitably, an Initiative. The Government would provide cash for schools to help them offer healthier school dinners. It was christened, predictably, the Healthy Food Initiative.
In North Yorkshire the healthy food cash bonus amounted to the princely sum of 7p per pupil per week. At Ripon College, with its 650 pupils, the head-teacher is counting the cost of the Government’s munificence. It amounts to a £53,000 hit on the budget. Increased cost of ingredients, a 15 per cent loss of income from “dinner money” as students voted with their feet and the inevitable host of accompanying regulations have left the school worse-off, the pupils possibly less healthily fed, and the Initiative about as welcome as a deluge on Sports Day.
The Initiative is not a one-off. Nutrition is part of the New Politics of Food. The other big component is the environment. The need to tackle obesity (costing the NHS £6bn a year) and climate change is changing the face of British politics.
It has brought a whole new vocabulary- who had heard terms like food miles or fair trade just a few years ago? Who would have imagined that one of the hottest issues in food retailing would be nutritional labelling as supermarkets line up behind rival indicators: traffic lights (Sainsbury’s) or Guideline Daily Amounts (Tesco)? Or that carbon labelling would be promised by retailers? A whole new regulatory industry has been born.
Stand up regulator-in-chief the Food Standards Agency and its chairman Dame Deirdre Hutton. The FSA is responsible for the nutritional profiling model which has led to the traffic light indicators on food packs. It is designed to alert consumers to the triple whammy of fat, salt and sugar. It is based on a portion size of 100 grams (about 4oz) – a methodology it maintains vigorously is science-based but which sends sections of the food industry into fury, with the food industry Bible – The Grocer- leading the pack.
Enter Ofcom- the Media regulator. It has translated these guidelines into rules for advertising. As a consequence some products cannot be advertising on TV in periods of children’s viewing. They include cheese, raisins (my grandchildren live off the mini-packs of raisins) and honey. The FSA is reviewing its nutritional profiling model but the outcome is well over a year away.
Regulator No 3: the Schools Food Trust. Blame Jamie Oliver for this one. Want to supply an organic cereal bar for school meals? Not on your Nellie, says the Trust.
At least none of these bodies was responsible for the refusal to sanction a re-run of Go to Work on an Egg. That was a media industry watchdog trying to interpret the rules to its members. Even the FSA has said that is daft.
None of this will go away. Nutrition is now Big P Politics. But what is needed is a clear and consistent message – however many regulators propagate it.
But nutrition is only part of the New Politics of Food. There is a new ethics abroad as well. And there is a real danger that ethics can, for some people, shade into religion.
Food Miles is probably the most contentious. The Soil Association, the Likkud faction of the organic movement, has flirted with the idea of outlawing products which travelled by air. Yet what price fair trade if we hit it with food miles? It is probably true that a Tesco lorry delivering from a central store does less damage to the environment than a clutch of farmers’ FWDs going to the local Sunday Farmers Market!
Another Initiative has already been unveiled: the new Prime Minister wants schools to offer five hours of sport per week. No doubt this is to complement to the healthy eating – or perhaps a good way of using up the calories supplied by the corner shop’s crisps and burgers. But has anyone asked how deliverable this will be? Does this government ever ask how deliverable policies are before they are introduced- viz tax credits and the Rural Payment Agency’s handling of CAP payments?
It’s enough to push you to drink. But, of course, we middle classes consume too much of that already. Pass the tap water someone.
© Local Government Chronicle
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