Читать книгу E for Additives - Maurice Hanssen - Страница 26

The Food Act prohibits the addition to food of any harmful substance. Is a flavour harmful or not?—we cannot be sure. The dividing lines between ground almonds, almond essence and synthetic almond flavouring could well illustrate the various stages between being an ingredient and an additive. So it would seem that what we really need to know is precisely what ingredient or additive is being used, so that we have the freedom to decide whether or not to eat it. At the moment there is no statutory declaration of the nature of food flavourings. We also need to have information on the toxicity of these flavours.

The European Community is attempting to produce a framework for controlling flavourings as part of the general harmonization of the Food Law within the community. Because some 4,000 substances are involved this will inevitably take a long time.

Many flavourings are difficult to analyse because they are chemically identical (nature-identical) to the substances which gave the product its character in the first place. This fact could produce bad law because, if you cannot analyse whether the substance is natural or artificial as an additive, then regulations controlling its use have little strength unless we also bring in—and this is envisaged—regular random factory inspections of food manufacturers to check precisely the nature of the ingredients that goes to make up their products. This is in addition to having the contents clearly defined on the label, so that we can make up our minds, too.

The European Community is working towards a positive list, which means giving approval for specified artificial and natural flavours. In spite of obvious difficulties this lack of information remains a substantial gap in our knowledge of what we are eating which should be remedied as soon as possible.

As to safety we have few doubts. Very few problems have been shown to be caused by food flavours and, so far as we can tell, none of these under normal circumstances. This is because the effectiveness of a food flavour depends on it being chemically similar to that found in nature and, if you happen to be allergic to strawberries, you would be unlikely to eat strawberry-flavoured products which could produce the same problems.

Watch out for ‘smoked’ fish. It is legally permissible to dip fish into ‘liquid smoke’, which is in truth a flavour, and then add colour as a replacement for the hues of the normal smoking process. Such fish can be described as ‘smoked’. Also, both smoked and cured fish, as with ham, when sold not ready-packed only have to carry the words ‘added permitted colour’, and so avoid the obligation to give a true list of ingredients.