Food integrity - No room for doubt on food labels

The relationship between consumer and food supplier is so fundamental to our wellbeing that the trust consumers show every time they buy a food product must always be justified and protected.

The vast majority of us depend on others to supply us and our families with food, so every time we buy food described as ‘X’, we need to know with certainty that what we are getting is precisely ‘X’.

This imperative justifies whatever intrusion officialdom makes into the food production and retail processes to ensure standards are met. As we become ever more urbanised and distant from the sources of our food, it is possible that safeguards will have to become even more stringent, rather than less so.

For Ireland Inc, this works on at least two levels — one, to protect consumers and, two, to protect the country’s reputation as a source of good, uncontaminated food. Much of our economic recovery is planned around food production, so our hard-won reputation as a trustworthy food producer is essentially priceless. Anything that threatens that status cannot be contemplated.

Though the extent to which some beef products have been compromised, or how they were compromised, with either horse or pork material, has yet to be finalised, it is important to recognise that this is not a health issue and that none of the products involved are in any way contaminated or dangerous. Mislabelled yes, a health risk no.

However, it is essential that we establish what went wrong in the production process so we can decide if burgers were compromised on purpose or accidentally. Let us hope it is the latter.

The investigation is focusing on ingredients imported from Spain and the Netherlands. That may be somewhat, but not entirely, reassuring. The questions of how this imported material is monitored or approved, much less used, remain and though it was produced abroad it ended up in the Irish food chain.

So too does the bigger question — do the Food Safety Authority’s findings represent inspired detective work or, as many people will fear, just the tip of a very large iceberg?

Food and retail conglomerates have regularly shown where their priorities lie and too often observing standards has more to do with protecting market share rather than protecting consumers. Consumers would be foolish to imagine that these international corporations regard them any more fondly than they do the food producers they so ruthlessly exploit.

Food retail is a cutthroat business and the recession has made it even more so. That does not mean we can accept that food should be so inaccurately described, and most of the firms involved have acknowledged this. Our aversion to horse meat is cultural rather than rational but our insistence on the integrity of food labelling is entirely rational and justified.

Nothing less than a full investigation, followed by the publication of the findings, will suffice and if those findings suggest that we need stricter rules then so be it. There can be no room for ambiguity or loopholes around how the food we all depend on to stay alive is described or guaranteed.