Review

Food policy digested

Perfectly Safe to Eat? The facts on food
Vicki Hird
Women’s Press, 2000, £8.99

The debates about the safety and healthiness of the food we eat are well-rehearsed and no doubt familiar to Health Matters readers.

This comprehensive and well-referenced book clearly explains, in ‘lay’ terms, the science and technology behind current food scares: the GM controversy; diet-related diseases; labelling; BSE; pesticide residues and farming practices.

The tone is not anti-science but the author is wary of the combined clout of big business and big science and mistrustful of technological ‘solutions’ which have shaped the global food policies we experience today.

Vicki Hird is policy director of Sustain, the pressure group and alliance for better food and farming, and as might be expected, her prime focus is on the power of consumers to bring about change.

But she does not promote an individualistic strategy – rather she looks to partnerships in policy-making, to representation on bodies such as the new Foods Standards Agency and to the active role communities might take in initiating different food shopping possibilities.

The author gives extensive details and contacts for organic box schemes, food co-ops, farmers’ markets, community-owned farms, local food directories and food growing.

The book is not bashful, however, about spelling out where and how, on the other hand, power needs to be limited. Supermarkets’ domination is shown to be responsible for much of the food poverty in our society, in both urban and rural areas, and the iniquities of global ‘free trade’, through which national governments are supported by corporate investment, demonstrate how hazardous the food industry is to the world’s poor.

The facts and figures in support of these arguments are a very useful reference source for the much needed public debate on food safety. Who could doubt that food policy is governed by interests likely to be detrimental to health when we learn that Tesco makes profits of £26m a day, or that just six companies control the world’s supply of grain?