FALSE COLOURS The abuse of chemicals to colour foodstuffs arouses
strong feelings in most of us; but the Ministry of Food's report on the subject exudes mainly a patient resignation, a 'boys will be boys' attitude to offenders. 'Although the dyeing of smoked fish has now become an established practice,' the report says, 'we regard this as an instance where the use of colour could have been challenged originally.' Why not challenge it now? The test in cases of this kind is simple: is synthetic colouring used tq delight the customer, or to delude her? Added yellow- ness makes margarine—or whiskey—more attractive and consequently more palatable; so long as no attempt is made to pretend that the marge is butter, what is the harm? But when a dye is employed to deceive the housewife into the belief that she is buying a properly smoked or cured fish, the resulting synthetic horror is not a 'kipper'; any attempt to sell it under that name should meet with prompt prosecu- tion. The fact that spurious lippere have been trading for years under false colours is beside the point : fraud does not cease to be fraud merely because it has escaped the legislators' eye. The report lacks punch even on the subject of chemicals of doubtful reputation. 'The colours permitted should ideally be restricted to those whose harmlessness has been established by adequate biological tests.' Why only 'ideally'? The recent decision to discontinue the sale of agenised flour has shown that such idealism can be translated into action, though admittedly it is to take a twelvemonth before the ban will finally be put into effect.
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