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'The FSA must have the guts to tell us the truth: if we want to eat safe food that won’t make us fat or ill, we need to choose unprocessed ingredients and cook them ourselves.' Photograph: Robb Kendrick/Getty Images/Aurora Creative
'The FSA must have the guts to tell us the truth: if we want to eat safe food that won’t make us fat or ill, we need to choose unprocessed ingredients and cook them ourselves.' Photograph: Robb Kendrick/Getty Images/Aurora Creative

Horsemeat or not, it's all junk

This article is more than 11 years old
It's naive to think a bolstered FSA is the answer to such scandals. It's been the biggest defender of processed food

There are growing calls for the Food Standards Agency's powers to be strengthened to avoid a repeat of the horsemeat scandal. Labour attributes the FSA's inability to either pre-empt the problem, or to get a grip on it when it happened, to Tory cuts in 2010. These, it says, left the agency hopelessly weakened.

It's an initially attractive argument. Bolster the FSA, carry out a few more tests here, tighten labelling there, and we can all go back to eating our processed meat products with relish. But it's naive. The truth is that the FSA, set up by Labour as the nation's food safety watchdog after BSE and other food scares, was useless from its very inception.

The first FSA boss, John Krebs, set the tone when he came into the job, endorsing the "safety" of GM food and dismissing organic food as "an image-led fad". His successors have since nurtured the comfortable relationship he established with "big food" (pharmaceutical and biotech companies, global food brands, supermarket chains) while continuing to treat food campaign groups, and any organisation or voice critical of the existing food system, as the lunatic fringe.

Consequently, a top job at the FSA has marked out its incumbents not as tireless fighters for higher quality, safer food, but as prime candidates for well-paid jobs in the food industry. One example of this revolving door is Tim Smith, the agency's CEO until last October. Now, in his new role as Tesco's group technical director, he has his hands full explaining to customers why Tesco burgers and spaghetti bolognese weren't all that they seemed.

Ill-equipped by temperament or inclination to upset corporate interests, the FSA has gently cajoled the food industry into curbing its worst excesses by getting companies to sign up to voluntary agreements and promising-sounding pledges. That done, the FSA has seen its job as downplaying the risks posed by these companies' products.

So, whenever revelations about our industrialised, globalised food chain surface, the FSA can be relied upon to pipe up like a parrot with its well-rehearsed script, designed to reassure us that we can have confidence in the food we eat. Boosting trust in the existing food system, irrespective of whether it is merited, by telling us that the latest scare poses no health risk, is the only language the FSA speaks.

That strategy has become difficult to maintain, however, as the horsemeat story unfolds. New to the job, the agency's current boss, Catherine Brown, has been more candid than her predecessors when she admitted that she would not eat a Findus lasagne. This may be why in recent days the FSA has chosen to field its more bullish director of operations, Andrew Rhodes. Heaven forbid that consumers should ever pick up the slightest hint that it might be unwise to eat processed food.

But if we are ever to make any progress towards having a saner, more wholesome food system, this defence of processed food has to stop. The FSA, the government and the public health establishment must have the guts to tell us the truth: if we want to eat safe, wholesome food that won't make us fat or ill, we need to choose unprocessed ingredients and cook them ourselves.

The very essence of food processing is taking apart natural foods and reinventing them in a value-added form that is more lucrative for their makers. The horsemeat fiasco has merely provided us with a snapshot of just how under-policed, and liable to fraud and adulteration, manufactured ready meals and processed meat products really are. Yet today there are still millions of portions of "convenience" food on supermarket shelves bearing a paragraph-long list of obscure ingredients, most of which have undergone many technological interventions and crossed continents by way of a long, circuitous supply chain.

Yesterday, following days of silence, the large food retailers finally spoke – but only after criticism from Downing Street. With the exception of Morrisons, they had retreated to their bunkers. But since they are well accustomed to having the FSA acting as their faithful press officer and fielding awkward questions when food scandals arise, this is hardly surprising.

We've been encouraged to believe that it's fine to live on processed food, providing we choose low-fat, low-cal versions with green traffic lights. But it isn't. Processed food is inherently dodgy. It comes from an increasingly dysfunctional industrial food system that is rotten to the core. That's the new message the FSA needs to get across.

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