panic on a plate

A recent documentary by Stefan Gates, Calf’s Head and Coffee, fell short of offering the ‘big idea’ it claimed, but it did illustrate the strange desire to find our cultural roots in food.

Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham thinks we are too dumb to be allowed to choose breakfast cereals for ourselves. The trouble is, so it seems does everyone else in a position of influence.

Two recent articles paint rather different pictures of food and food prices.

While slapping taxes on ‘unhealthy’ food has been a policy receiving much support in political circles, Denmark has dropped the idea after just a year.

Food campaigners and crusading medics want to persuade us that Big Sugar is a force for evil. But whatever the science behind what we eat, the idea that the government should regulate our diets is the most dangerous idea of all.

Proposed legislation in California to label GM food assumes there is something scary and different about it.

Tesco’s introduction of traffic-light food warnings shows how normal the nudging of the masses has become.

We are told that we need new policies to change the nation’s eating habits, in order to tackle obesity and, in turn, type-2 diabetes. But even in the unlikely event that we eradicated obesity, diabetes would remain a major burden on healthcare costs.

A couple of interesting snippets on the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) website. The first is about the dangers, or not, of neonicotinoid pesticides.

More clear-cut is this rebuttal of an article in The Sunday Times, which seemed to suggest that cod in the North Sea would soon be a childhood memory.