Chargrilled Achill Mountain Lamb with Labneh, Pomegranate and Fresh Mint Leaves

A READER struggling to decipher labels at supermarkets writes to me: “How on earth do I find food I can trust nowadays?”

The answer is it’s getting more perplexing now that multinational food companies have put their considerable energy and might into cleaning up labels so they sound more natural and less scary to the average consumer — a major exercise to quell our fears about the composition of products.

Food manufactures and processors are well aware that people are reassured by familiar sounding ingredients. So terms like natural, authentic, preservative and additive-free are proliferating on labels.