Last week the UK Conservative Party held its annual conference. Most of the British media’s coverage focused on the various tribulations which haunted the Prime Minister, Theresa May, as she attempted to deliver her keynote speech. But a coughing fit, an interruption by a prankster and a collapsing set weren’t the only causes for embarrassment at that conference. As one newspaper, spotted, the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt managed to deliver […]
Britain leads the rest of the world in consumption of ready meals. Our trust in the manufacturers of processed foods and drinks would be touching if it was not so harmfully misplaced. Time and again, those processed food and drink manufacturers have been shown to be far more concerned about maximising and protecting their profits than they are about the health of their customers. Their most profitable ingredient is also […]
The recent announcement by the makers of Dolmio and Uncle Ben’s, advising consumers that their sauces should only be consumed once a week, struck me on two levels. Firstly, as the manufacturer was not required to make this declaration, I wondered what could have motivated it to take such a unilateral step. Ever the cynic, I believe this move was less about serving the interests of consumers and more about […]
What a charmed life companies like Kellogg’s, McDonald’s, KFC, Mars, Nestlé, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo have been leading here in the UK. For months they have kept their corporate heads down while all around them there has been a growing clamour for the UK government to introduce a sugar tax on unhealthy products, many of them produced by these self same companies. The government, however, seems more concerned with protecting its […]
A bizarre, but also deeply disturbing, battle over food labelling has been waged across the USA over the past couple of years. On the one hand are consumer groups who believe US citizens have the right to know whether the food they buy contains genetically modified organisms (GMOs). On the other are the very companies responsible for putting GMOs into food who do not want US citizens to know if […]
Many nations and regions have contributed unique and wonderful styles of cuisine to the world, and in my view the uniqueness of those contributions is something to celebrate. However, as globalisation marches on, interconnecting more and more parts of the world, so it is that our culinary preferences appear to shrink correspondingly, towards homogeneity and mediocrity. How depressing it is, for example, to think that there is a McDonald’s in […]
Three weeks ago the charity Diabetes UK warned that diabetes “threatens to bring down the National Health Service” unless we tackle the obesity crisis through better food regulation. This warning echoed a similar prediction by the Chief Executive of the NHS, Simon Stevens, who in May this year called for sugar to be taken out of food and fizzy drinks to help tackle the obesity epidemic. He went on to […]
In a relatively short period of time high fructose corn syrup has replaced natural sugar as a sweetener right across the food industry. It is now widely used in products such as cereals, breads, cakes, crackers, soft drinks, soups, yoghurts, baked beans, ice creams, ketchups and salad dressings. In fact, so pervasive is this product that it might be just as easy to list those commercial food products that don’t […]