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Next Friday, a week today, marks an anniversary the food industry should mark with fear and much trepidation. In Miami on July 8th 1999, a Florida court jury found tobacco companies responsible for the health consequences of smokers. As evidence mounts of the health consequences of packaging products containing BPA and other plasticisers, the world’s court rooms could find major food producers in the dock.
There have been a number of interesting responses to last week’s opinion piece on the responsibility of food producers to tell their customers what is in their food, palm oil or not. A number thought that this knowledge was irrelevant, as objecting to palm oil was not done on the basis of health, but through concern over the environmental consequences of cutting down tropical rain forests to establish palm oil plantations.
Given that one of the classics of American food writing is MFK Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf, it is hardly surprising to find an Arizona restaurant offering ‘lionburgers’ to its customers. Nor that the restaurant concerned is an Italian-themed property that, in a reasonable world, would not be offering burgers of any sort. But this is America, the part of America that chef Ken Hom calls “the flyover”, as in “culinary America is like a donut, with substance on the outside and nothing in the middle, so you have the East Coast, the West Coast, New Orleans and the flyover”.
The decision by a number of food producers not to reveal whether they use palm oil in their products is at best deceptive behaviour; a display of the sort of attitude that will compromise the credibility of the entire food industry. With issues of provenance and food safety appearing more frequently as headlines, food producers run the risk that the entire industry will become marginalised in the way the pharmaceutical, oil and banking industries have in recent months, unless they show they can be trusted.
Members of the European Parliament have backed a proposal to make country of origin labelling compulsory on all fish, meat, dairy and poultry products. The decision was overshadowed by the rejection of traffic light food labels by the same parliament.
Rejection by European Parliament increases interest in German proposal.
Our friends across the ditch may be trying to claim the All Whites one-all draw with Slovakia as an Australasian achievement, but on Tuesday 15th June achievements of a culinary nature were squarely with New Zealand.
Attempts to reduce oversupply taken as anticompetitive.
Greens cautious over transgenic solution to agricultural greenhouse gas.
Daily price 12% higher than 12 months ago. Rising demand for chocolate is forcing up global cocoa prices, with the latest figures from the International Cocoa Organisation (ICCO) up 12% on the same time last year. The rise continues a trend that began in 2006 and is a direct response to increasing chocolate consumption throughout [...]
Winers are Grinners: New Zealand King Salmon export sales manager Graeme Tregidga is all smiles flanked by European chefs holding the six awards presented to the company at the recent International Taste and Quality Institute (iTQi) Superior Taste Awards in Brussels. New Zealand King Salmon (NZKS) entered six products in the various awards categories and [...]
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