Consuming Interest.
Gilding The Kipper
By LESLIE ADRIAN
JUST how far are food manufacturers allowed to go by law when dress- ing up their products to please the eye as well as the palate? This question was recently brought home to me by a reader who sent me an orange N■ it h 'Colour Added' stamped on its rind. Asking about this parti- cular piece of deception (probably harmless enough, because some kinds of orange are ripe but do not look it—a little colour helps to sell them, and no one eats the skin) I was told that a favourite dye for this purpose is annatto, which produces a deep yellow colour, also suitable for dyeing whisky, 'red' Cheshire cheese (which used to be coloured with carrot juice in the good old days), and margarine. Annatto comes from a South American tree, and was widely used by primi- tive Indians for dyeing their bodies; it takes civilisation to inspire people to dye their food. It is also a useful substitute for saffron, which is more expensive. They are both vegetable dyes and, as such, are permitted under the Colouring Matter in Food Regulations, 1957. It is these rules which enforce the labelling of citrus fruit which has been touched up artistically. No other fruit or vegetable, nor meat, fish, game or poultry `in a raw and unprocessed state which is intended for sale for human consuniption shall have in or upon it . . . any added colouring matter.'
Like so many apparently categorical prohibi- tions this one, on closer examination, is seen to leave the door open to all kinds of jiggery- pokery. For as soon as any of this stuff ceases to be raw or unprocessed it can be coloured, either with the permitted 'natural' dyes or with the coal tar colours on the permitted list, and they are numerous. Our new friend annatto turns up again as the colouring which gives kippers and haddock that appetising look which we associate with the smokehouse, for neither of these fish is unprocessed.
I have, too, a packet of 'Demerara' sugar which, I bought from an honest grocer who assured me- it was the genuine article. Compared with other samples it looked suspiciously like white sugar dyed brown. Sure enough, minute inspection of the packet brought to light the words 'Contents, —Sugar and edible colouring.' Like the correc- tions in sothe newspapers they were not pro- minently featured. How far does this deceitful- ness extend? We cannot know, because the re- gulations do not insist that 'bread, flour confec- tionery, butter, cheeses, margarine, sugar confectionery, ice cream and other frozen confections' should be labelled as containing colouring because of 'undue practical difficulties to the trade without compensating advantage to the consumer.' And the Food Standards Com- mittee, which compiled the list quoted, does not think that 'excisable liquors' need be labelled as containing added colour. Which suggest that many of them do contain it. Certainly caramel is used to darken whisky and beer (especially mild ale), and annatto comes in handy again for the less reputable whiskies. The dyeing of white bread for sale as 'brown' (Well, madam, it is brown, isn't it?') is not something that the bakers will easily be persuaded to admit, but I am convinced it happens. It is easier to make one lot of low extraction flour with one set of bolting cloths and then colour a proportion of it, rather than go to the bother (in a modern mill, a quite disruptive bother) of milling a separate batch of high extraction flour. And the con- venience of the trade comes first.
It is doubtful if the influence of any . . . re- former (posing as a champion of the individual safety and protector of the public welfare) would ever equal or exceed that of a powerful commercial interest anxious to introduce a new material or technique into food production.
So said the British Medical Journal in 1954. What of some of the chemical colouring agents now in use? Writing of canned, pro- cessed peas in his book The Townsman's Food Magnus Pyke says, 'The green dye used is, so far as is known, harmless and, being water- soluble, is quickly excreted from the body.' So far as is known. . . . Has anyone tried to find out? It would be nice to know, because pro- cessed peas are consumed in vast quantities by the poorer section of the population. Similarly with jam: fruit pulp is used, preserved with sulphur dioxide which bleaches it (not to worry, 96 per cent, of the preservative boils off in the making), and colour is added to remove its pallor. Apart from a gnawing anxiety that we are accumulating traces of harmful chemicals, the chief irritant is that we are deceived in our daily. bread, and in the butter we spread on it, and in almost everything else we eat. To some extent it is our own fault—we can't help being numerous and hungry, but we rather ask for some of the ruses that the food processor gets up to. Who would eat white marge? Or buy a white custard powder ('added colour' is the 'egg' in this)? No, we're stuck with it, and we do have the general protection of ,the Food Standards Committee. But as yet the rules are not tight enough to eliminate certain dishonest and pos- sibly dangerous practices.
Some correspondents disagree with my criticism of those brewers who refuse to stock certain foreign lagers in their pubs: taking ;he line that as we don't expect an Eldorado man to sell Wall's ices, or vice versa, we can hardly complain when a brewer does not want to sell his competitors' goods. This argument would have some sense to it if the proportion of pubs directly controlled by brewers were limited; but when, as now, the vast majority are 'tied'—and tied to an ever-diminishing group of giant pub- owning combines—the situation is unhealthy and monopolistic. The brewers are, or soon will be, in a position where they can strangle the sales of any beverage for which there is not a gigantic demand.
It is still possible for a new independently made drink like Baby Cham, if backed by suffi- cient advertising, to get into the pubs, but as the Oligopoly gets tighter it will become increasingly difficult. Increasingly the consumer with a minority taste in drink will have to do without. It is difficult to see how this trend—a concomi- tant of bigness and certainly not confined to brewing—can be arrested. Some brewers are more liberal than others. Whitbreads, I under- stand, allow their individual managers very wide freedom in their choice of what non-brewery lines to stock; Courage and Barclay, with their own soft drink interests, are more restrictive.
The answer is, wherever possible, to patronise free houses, or those tied houses where the brewer allows his managers freedom of choice.
Complaints about laundries—their slow deliv- ery service, their ability to damage almost any- thing and their inability to do just what you want—continually reach me and I have done my fair share of complaining here. I'm pleased. therefore, to report some good service by my own laundry.
Last week, on the morning when my laundry was due to be collected. I went out in a hurry and forgot to leave the laundry box outside the door. I returned to find a printed card saying that the laundry had called, had found no one in and would call again next week. It happened to be a heavy week for us—sheets, shirts, towels—so I telephoned the, manager to ask if there was any possibility that the laundry might be collected before next week. He said he would do his best to collect next day; and next day it was collected. I telephoned to thank him for what I told him was a very welcome service. (I owed him at least this as, having bought a washing machine, we now send him smaller quantities of laundry than we once did.) He made the point that far too few of his customers trouble to telephone him' to complain, not to thank him. He would be pleased to hear from customers whose shirts were starched either just too little or just too much, for example, so that he could see to it that their shirts were done the way they wanted them done.
People give up too easily in the fight for good service and a good laundry loses a customer who only needs, in some cases, to make one telo' phone call to get what he wants.
This case? The Royal Laundry, 131 West. bridge Road, Battersea, SWI I.
Previous page
