You can't have different rules for trendy social enterprises - however noble their mission

About four years ago a chap called Adam Smith set up the Real Junk Food Project:

We are a revolutionary concept designed to challenge and highlight the issues of food waste while creating inclusive environments where everyone is welcome. Consisting of cafés, outside catering, events, Sharehouse’s and Fuel For School, we use the Pay As You Feel Concept to utilise surplus food, educate the general public and campaign against global issues that food waste creates.

We intercept surplus food from a wide range of places including supermarkets, restaurants, wholesalers, food banks, food photographers and using common sense and decades of experience make a judgement on whether the food is fit for human consumption.

In a world where the default response of the environmentally-concerned is to shout at government and organise meetings, Adam Smith stands out as one of those people who just went and did something. Rather than ask government to spend taxpayers money he and his colleagues walked head-on towards the regulations and management practices that encourage food waste. This is both admirable and innovative and has my support.

There is, however, a problem because Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 on the provision of food information to consumers (“FIC”) confirms that:

...it remains an offence to place food with an expired ‘use by’ date on the market and if such food is discovered then it must automatically be deemed unsafe. This is not a rebuttable presumption.

Yesterday the news broke that the Real Junk Food Project was under investigation by West Yorkshire Trading Standards:

West Yorkshire Trading Standards (WYTSS) said it found more than 400 items past their use-by date at the RJFP warehouse on the Grangefield Estate in Pudsey.

A letter sent to RJFP states 444 items, which were a cumulative total of 6,345 days past the use-by dates, were discovered.

The regulations, at least as I see them, seem pretty unequivocal and WYTSS had little choice but to conduct an investigation indeed failing to do so might be seen as failing in its duty. And WYTSS is clearly not singling out the Real Junk Food Project - here is a successful prosecution from May 2017:

A supermarket owner has been ordered to pay more than £20,000 in fines and costs for selling items of food up to nearly 50 days over their use-by date.

Trading Standards made a routine visit to Shimla Superstore Ltd, in Clayton Road, Bradford, on September 13 last year and discovered 88 items available for sale past their use-by date.

Of these, five items of a turkey product with olives were 48 days out of date.

When added together, the total number of days past the use-by date for all 88 items was 1,769.

It is clear that trading standards cannot make a distinction between a project such as the Real Junk Food Project set up with noble motives and a straightforward food retailer. This doesn't mean that RJFP doesn't have a defence - Adam Smith is, as he says, an experienced chef - but does ask the question as to whether the absolute nature of the regulation in question needs challenge.

If we are to improve the efficiency in which we use food resources (there's a debate to be had about this but, for now, let's assume this is a great idea and that efficiency is defined by how little is thrown away) then the way in which food safety regulations are applied probably needs questioning. At the heart of all this is where responsibility rests - with the consumer or with the manufacturer. In essence this is the same debate as that about raw milk cheese - if you go to, for example, to The Courtyard Dairy at Settle, they'll ask you whether you're OK with cheese made from unpasteurised milk as this provides them cover since the consumer is accepting the risk (as far as I know this wouldn't work in Scotland).

Others will doubtless pour over the laws involved here and quite rightly so. There will be calls for changes to the regulations (England's regulations on raw milk are, for example, far less stringent than those in Scotland) although, so long as we're members of the EU, this is a slow, torturous and contested process. But in the end, regulatory agencies such as trading standards and the Food Standards Agency cannot have regard to the mission of the organisation breaching the regulations regarding, in this case, the sale or use of products passed their 'use by' date.

What I hope is that this debate questions the manner in which 'use by' dates are applied by food manufacturers. There is a petition raised which again lifts the debate from the mundane pages of council committee reports or the shock-horror of local paper reporting but we have to accept that in a complex food distribution system and a dynamic market regulations exist to protect consumers. And that this applies just as much to trendy social enterprises as it does to huge supermarket chains. The regulations we have didn't arise to promote food waste (I'm sure food manufacturers and retailers would prefer more scope and less waste) but were introduced to protect consumers from the health risks associated with old, poorly-stored and/or damaged food.

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Tax offices, roast potatoes and the accountability of experts

Anyone who was even half-awake will have spotted the roast potato story. You know, the one where the UK's Food Standards Agency (FSA) advised us that we'll catch cancer from crispy roast spuds, well done toast, thin crust pizza and trendy thrice-cooked chips.

"The Government has been accused of “massively overreacting” by telling people not to eat crispy roast potatoes or browned toast despite there being no scientific proof of a link to cancer.

Experts said the Food Standards Agency’s (FSA) new campaign, which warns people against cooking starchy foods at high temperatures for long periods, risks undermining support for “real” public health priorities like tackling obesity."

The thing here is that it's "the government" providing this advice, the government that's run by those people we elect. Or so we're told. Especially during court hearings about who's the boss, parliament or government. Now I've trawled through dozens of news reports looking for a comment on this story by a minister of the government that has made this announcement. An announcement that is so misleading and lacking in evidential support that it undermines the credibility of the FSA, the organisation set up by the government to make sure our food is safe. Nor (although I may have missed it) has anything been said by Heather Hancock who chairs the FSA "Board".

What's clear here is that no-one is looking the FSA's experts in the eye and saying something like: "Are you really sure you want to tell folk roast potatoes are bad for them on the basis of a very tiny increased cancer risk? You'll look very silly." Or, after said experts have rushed out with their shocking advice, no-one is pulling them into the office and telling them to go and change the bloody advice to something that doesn't make the FSA look like a bunch of rather dumb health fascists.

Let's imagine for a second that some MP - maybe Philip Davies - asks the appropriate Secretary of State (it's pretty tricky to actually find out who this is by the way) what's going on and why, despite the lack of scientific evidence, they thought is just fine to tell folk not to eat well-done toast. I'm pretty sure that the minister in question will respond with some sort of well-honed quip followed by an explanation that the FSA is a "non-ministerial department, supported by 7 agencies and public bodies" so nothing to do with me guv.

All this brings me to the matter of tax offices. Now, whatever we think of Her Majesty's Revenues and Customs, there are a lot of people working in tax offices. And, here in Bradford we have two of these offices - one in the centre of Bradford and one at Shipley. The nice people at HMRC propose, as part of some sort of reorganisation or restruture, to close these offices and open a brand spanking new shiny office. The problem is that HMRC propose to put that office in Leeds. Apparently (although this isn't very clear) because they don't think they can recruit the right quality of staff if they're based in Bradford.

It may well be that all this is absolutely the right thing to do, that the efficiency and effectiveness of tax collection will be enhanced by the merging of these offices into the new super-office in Leeds. But just like the roast potatoes it's pretty difficult for us to make any persuasive contrary argument - such as why not have your super-office in Bradford. I know this because Philip Davies did ask questions of the correct minister who defended the HMRC decision. It's important to note here that the minister, for all his willingness to respond, is not really in a position to overrule the HMRC on this matter because HMRC is a "non-ministerial department, supported by 2 agencies and public bodies".

There's nothing new about this problem and ministers have for three decades hidden behind the semi-detached nature of these "non-ministerial departments" with their "boards" and "directors". From the prison service through defence procurement to decisions about overseas aid such agencies act without proper accountability while making pronouncements and decisions affecting millions without the benefit of public accountability. They are the experts and neither their "boards" not ministers seem able to control what they do.

Here in Bradford we'll keep making the case for those tax officials to come to Bradford but the experts in question - the HMRC management and its property advisors - do not have to do anything except politely nod, smile and proceed to remove a few hundred jobs (and a pile of business rates) from Bradford. And the worldwide coverage of roast potatoes will fade while the advice remains on the FSA website and gradually becomes, like salt and raw milk, received wisdom among those who enforce food standards.

There's plenty of good reasons to have agencies of these sort and plenty of reason to listen carefully to what experts tell us. But there are also good reasons why our Government - by which I mean the secretaries-of-state and assorted ministers not officialdom - should be accountable for their decisions and empowered to change them if they seem wrong or unhelpful.

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Fussbuckets target the trendy burger....

The nannying fussbuckets at Westminster City Council have the humble burger in their sights. Not, this time, the McDonald's or Burger King variety but the trendy, handmade gastropub burger:

...council officials are cracking down on the freedom to choose how your burger is done, warning restaurants not to offer them rare or even medium-rare.

A number of celebrity chefs are affected by the move, including Gordon Ramsay, whose Maze Grill restaurant sells a burger for £12, Angela Hartnett, whose York and Albany’s bar menu includes burgers, and the Soho House chain, run by Nick Jones, the husband of broadcaster Kirsty Young.

All face being asked at their next routine inspection how they offer their burgers after the decision by Westminster city council, which regulates food safety in more restaurants than any other local authority.

The decision is expected to be followed by other councils, but critics fear it could lead to questions over the safety of rare steaks and raw meat dishes such as steak tartare. 

A quite unnecessary overreaction - but not a surprise from a profession that nearly destroyed the egg industry and still threatens unpasteurised artisan cheese. And why am I not surprised to see the man who made this prediction involved:

Two million Britons could die in the bird flu pandemic that experts warn is both imminent and inevitable, one of the country's leading authorities has told The Independent on Sunday.

Professor Hugh Pennington, the president of the Society for General Microbiology and professor emeritus of bacteriology at Aberdeen University, also criticised the the Government's "optimistic" attitude to a potentially devastating pandemic, likening it to official complacency over BSE a decade ago.

We are using the word of a man who predicted millions of deaths from BSE/CJD, who warned of disaster from bird flu, who said TV chefs were 'unhygeinic', who said our Christmas turkey was filled with deadly germs - a veritable Dr Doom of food safety.

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