15 DECEMBER 1967, Page 11

Foreign bodies

CONSUMING INTEREST

LESLIE ADRIAN

At about the same time as Mrs Donoghue found a decomposing snail in her ginger-beer bottle in Paisley, I discovered a cockroach under my Dover sole in Piccadilly. Her shock and gastro-enteritis led to an historic action, fought in 1932 all the way up to the House of Lords, which strikingly extended legal pro- tection for consumers. My own youthful ex- perience resulted in nothing so dramatic— merely a temporary aversion from fish (eventu- ally cured by wartime rationing) and a per- manent delight in stories calculated to assuage my trauma. Among the true stories I relish that of the enterprising claimant who on in- vestigation by suspicious insurance companies, turned out to have found a beetle in his soup in no fewer than twelve different restaurants. From, the ben trovato category I instance the diner who,' discovering a wood shaving in a sausage, complained indignantly, 'Look -here, waiter, I don't mind eating a bit of dog, but I'm hanged if I'm going to tackle the. kennel.'

In one county alone during the last ad- ministrative year, pieces of wire were found in sausages at two different schools; splinters from tiles in a steak-and-kidney pudding; slivers of glass in strawberry jam; cigarette ends in a gooseberry pie and in a packet of pickling spice; congealed bristles from a nylon brush in a doughnut; what looked like a clump of blond hair, but proved to be hessian fibres from a sugar bag, in a tin of rice pudding; glass, foil, debris, cement and paint in milk bottles; and a length of wire; a piece of ferrous metal and an oven glove in loaves of bread. All this happened in Buckinghamshire; other local authorities could, and many do, report similar foreign bodies in food and drink. The most commonly contaminated items are bread and milk. In these, people have found insects, the whole or parts of dead mice, string, pins, buttons, cardboard, hairgrips, adhesive dress- ings, finger stalls, even bits of human finger.

Far more alien matter is discovered than gets reported. The offending articles are often thrown away from apathy, ignorance or plain disgust. This is surely against the public in- terest. For even though you may not have (or do not wish to pursue) a civil claim for damages, the general benefit .of the community is at stake in maintaining high standards for foodstuffs. Northamptonshire's chief inspector of weights and measures is right to say that, with increasing mechanisation and pre-packag- ing, 'it is difficult not to feel some sympathy with the problems of most manufacturers,' but his conclusion that 'in some cases greater care can still be taken and further precautions- ob- served' is equally incontrovertible. So if you are unfortunate enough to have this kind of thing happen, contact your local council, who will advise which authority and department— public health or, much more probably, weights and measures—is responsible for coping. Your complaint can then be investigated, and the firm concerned will either be cautioned or prosecuted if the evidence warrants this,. I say 'if,' because (in this context at least) the customer is not always right. Mrs X of Somerset recently made the dickens of a fuss about glass in a packet of brown sugar. She demonstrated to the inspector that all glassware in the cupboard where she kept the packet was

intact. Following inconclusive inquiries of the retailer, the wholesalers, the packers and the refiners, the county's public analyst was called in and reported that the sliver was of the specific gravity of heat-resisting glass. Back went the inspector to ask whether the com- plainant had any such glassware and if he might see it. She angrily retorted that he was wasting his time. In truth she was wasting it; for, when finally prevailed upon to produce her glass ovenware (from a cupboard other than that in which the sugar was kept), she was disconcerted to be shown that the sliver exactly fitted a chip in one of the pieces. Only then did she remember keeping the sugar for a while in that cupboard and moving it because of its easy accessibility to her pet dog.

Somerset's chief inspector has the charity to note that this case is 'not by any means typical.' It had better not be,. since over the country as a a whole the weights and measures inspectorate is (at the lowest estimate) 20 per cent under- staffed. It already has responsibilities—increas- ingly widely interpreted and developed—under a disparate and extensive catalogue of legisla- tion relating to trade transactions, and now the duty of enforcing the Consumer Protection Bill is shortly to fall upon it. Why, I wonder, do we persist in the idiosyncrasy of putting social laws on the statute book without ensur- ing adequate recruitment to the ranks of those who have to make them work?