DO NOT KNOW why the court case of the mushroomless
mushroom soup should have attracted so much attention, while the case of the creamless ice-cream, which was being argued the same day in the Commons. attracted no atten- tion at all The prosecution of the soup manufac- turers ought never to have been brought; boletus Midis, from which they make the soup, may look like a toadstool to a county council food inspector, but to the trade and to the diner-out it is. as it has always been, a mushroom. With ice-cream the opposite is true; in the trade 'ice- cream' includes ices made from vegetable fats, and probably few diners-out would know the difference (in a tasting session on television a few months ago a schoolboy guessed right, but Richard Dimbleby and an 'expert' brought in for the occasion guessed wrong). But to a food inspec- tor the fact that an imitation is close should not make it any the less an imitation. I am sorry, therefore, that the Government has decided to continue to allow ices which have no dairy content to masquerade as ice-cream.
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