Towards the end (just on the 27' mark in the podcast) of today's Life Scientific, Professor Chris Elliott, a pioneer in detecting food fraud, raised worries about the probity of future food imports.
My fear in the UK now is we're likely going to face another scandal like the horsemeat scandal. Now we've got the National Food Crime Unit in operation which is doing a wonderful job but we've lost total control of food that is being imported into the UK. There are no checks, no inspections, it's just a free-for-all. So people are going to make a lot of money, there's going to be criminal activity. Where in the food system is that going to turn up? Will it be in the multiple retailers? - very unlikely. But is it going to be in the small stores, the corner stores and food service - yes, likely. So I have a horrible feeling we have another food crisis coming down the road. [...]
The science is there, I've described all the wonderful techniques we can do in terms of detection, but if there's nobody there to actually take samples then are going to be massive problems. [...] we've left the European Union - for good or bad, people will have their own opinions of it - but just in terms of our food system it has left us much, much more vulnerable, because most of the food that comes in to the UK comes in through Europe, particularly through Rotterdam. That was always the first line of defence. Anything coming into the UK now in Rotterdam, it's not checked, it's not inspected, it's given free passage to wherever it wants to now. The UK has basically said now: that's the responsibility of the industry.
Big companies will look after themselves because they've got all the issues about reputational damage, but if you think about all the small stores and food service, they don't have the technical know-how, they don't have the budgets to do a lot of checking and inspecting.
Is this really the red tape the government wants to get rid of?
No comments:
Post a Comment