Читать книгу E for Additives - Maurice Hanssen - Страница 22

Fresh unwrapped bread carries no list of ingredients simply because there is nowhere to put it. The same applies to cakes and pastries. But when the product is wrapped and sold in an off-the-shelf form, then certain ingredients have to be listed, and you may well find that your wholemeal bread and, even more probably, your brown bread, contains added caramel and numerous other ingredients that are not necessary in the kitchen.

There is no good reason why the foods in the baker’s or the butcher’s that have been prepared on the premises have no list of ingredients. It would be easy to do and it would help us make an informed choice.

In addition to the unnamed additives on unwrapped bread there are also additives which do not have to be declared even when the product is wrapped. Chief among these must be the flour bleach, benzoyl peroxide (no E number). It is certainly very puzzling that we in Britain need to use a bleach at all when most leading European countries have either banned bleaches or found them completely unnecessary. Another area of contamination is the lingering presence of pesticides and fungicides applied not only to the growing crops but also in the storage silos to prevent insect infestation and fungal growth.

Ham and other meat products on the delicatessen counter have to show the amount of water present (at any rate to some extent, see page 25) but the other additives only need to be identified by their category name, a throw-back to the 1970 regulations. So a ham description may say ‘maximum 25 per cent added water, added preservative and colour’, unless it is in a packet.

Such loopholes are a negation of all the progress made in other areas of food labelling. The largest part of all food sold in this way is produced by manufacturers who are perfectly able to provide a label for the point of sale giving, in a legible size of lettering, the same information that would be required if the same product were sold in a packet instead of loose, or else it is produced by the shop itself, who must know the recipe.

Even the present very limited regulations are being openly abused in large numbers of shops where no ingredient information at all is supplied about the loose foods on sale. Our Trading Standards Officers, who should be enforcing the rules, have limited resources but are usually most helpful when apparent breaches of the regulations are drawn to their attention. It is a courtesy, however, to first warn the shop management of any likely problem so that they can put things right.